Sir, I am dismayed by some of your coverage of the recent rise in the numbers of asylum seekers to Ireland (April 18th and 19th). Although most of the reports were written by your development correspondent, Paul Cullen, they provide little analysis of global development issues and offer no explanation for the appalling fact that at the present time, 30 million people around the world are forced to become refugees and why in fact only a tiny 10 per cent of that number arrive in Europe.
There are a number of misleading discrepancies in Mr Cullen's reports. For example, the headline in the first report reads "Gardai step up ports surveillance to stern flow of illegal immigrants: suspicion of smuggling refugees for large fees". In actual fact, people who enter this country and seek refugee status here, whether they arrive at airports or "arrive in the country hidden in lorries" are doing so under very specific UN legislation, which was established to protect the rights of refugees and to which Ireland is party. Juxtaposing the terms "Immigrant" "Illegal" and "refugee" in a such haphazard way, creates the provocative impression that the people in question are breaking the law. One must wonder also, although your correspondent does not, that if people are desperate enough to make the long and dangerous journey to Ireland hidden in lorries, the conditions they are leaving behind must indeed be extreme.
The headline in the following day's article was equally alarming "Images aimed at Tourists attract Refugees as well" (Irish Times, April 19th) and the article goes on to inform us that refugees are responding to the same positive images projected at tourists and industrialists. What sort of message does this imply? That we should be careful where we direct our advertising, for fear of negative consequences? That we want to invite only well heeled outsiders into this country?
Running alongside Mr Cullen's article was an interview with two Romanian gypsy women who say that they have come to Ireland because economic conditions are better here and "they heard Ireland was beautiful". It would seem that these women are economic migrants and therefore don't even belong to the group that Mr Cullen is discussing.
Moreover the tone of the interview supports the impression that people who come to Ireland either as economic migrants or as tourists come here for the same lighthearted reasons that tourists do. Was it not possible to find a refugee to interview? Or is this the image your newspaper wants to create of the "typical refugee"? In fact it is possible that if a typical refugee had been interviewed, readers might find the circumstances which forced them to leave their country almost too painful to read, in my experience is the common experience of refugees.
In fairness, your editorial on the same day (April 19th) did attempt to redress the balance in terms of humane and unbiased journalism, by reminding us that the rise in numbers in refugees to Ireland was still paltry compared to other European countries and that Ireland has conspicuously failed to stake its fair share of refugees in the past and most importantly, made the sobering and pertinent point that it is not so long ago that we Irish "were seeking succour and support at ports and airports in America, Australia and in Britain.
However, it is an unfortunate fact that prominent news reports reach a wider audience than editorial pages. Your correspondents might have been more useful employed describing the services (or lack of them) which exist in this country for asylum seekers, which are so underresourced and inadequate that for many asylum seekers, women, men and many children, the traumatic conditions which led them to leave their homes in the first place are almost replicated in the country in which they seek asylum. Yours, etc.,
Philipsburgh Avenue,
Dublin 3.