The history of this country has meant that we are more used to exporting people as refugees than welcoming them here as refugees. For much of the past 300 years Irish people fleeing famine, war and persecution have gone to the far ends of the earth. The Wild Geese and the Flight of the Earls are founding myths in modern Irish national conctousness. Ulster Protestants are proud of the number of US presidents who came from families who crossed the Atlantic in search of religious freedom.
Following the founding of an independent Ireland, there was a tendency to turn inwards to the Sinn Fein ideal of a self contained, Irish-speaking state cut off from the concerns of the wider 20th century world. This meant that Jewish and other refugees from Nazism faced a cold shoulder in the thirties and forties. In the 1950s a small group of Hungarians fleeing Communism set a new precedent for offering refugees the warmth of an Irish welcome. In the 1970s, it was the turn of Chileans fleeing a right wing dictatorship. At the end of that decade came the Vietnamese and in recent years the Bosnians.
Today, Ireland's profile as a fully fledged member of the European Union, with its image of wealth and security, has started to attract the attention of refugees fleeing war and poverty in Africa, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. The number of people reaching our shores to seek asylum has multiplied by an extraordinary one thousand per cent in the past three years. The reasons are many the influence of our missionaries and aid workers; the international gateway that is Shannon airport; the worldwide reputation, whether we like it or not, of the IRA as anti colonial fighters; even the Irish soccer team's televised exploits in successive World Cups.
We have a reputation as a compassionate people, with a long history of struggle against injustice and occupation. One must hope that the harsh treatment of the two Ukrainian women and their sick children at Shannon last weekend was an isolated example. The Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Ms Joan Burton, has said that if those Ukrainian families contact the Irish embassy in Moscow with a request for their children to come to Ireland through the Chernobyl Childrens Project for medical treatment, the Government will "bend over backwards to facilitate them."
However, more than compassion is needed in our handling of refugees. The rapid growth in the number of asylum seekers reaching western Europe has provoked a flurry of draconian anti immigration measures to consolidate what has been dubbed `Fortress Europe'. In fact, despite the alarmist cries of European governments, only 5 to 6 per cent of the world's refugees are found in Western Europe. Most are in some of the world's poorest countries, particularly in Africa. Refugees, as one of the most vulnerable groups in our society, also have human rights. The right to a just determination of status in a strange country is a basic one. Minister Burton and her colleague, the Minister for Justice, Mrs Nora Owen, have rightly been praised for the generous provisions of the new Refugee Act. We must wait to see how humanely, and with what respect for refugees' rights, its structures are operated by their officials.