Let’s turn refugee tragedy into a triumph of humanity

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

I love the Irish people! Your compassion and love for your fellow human beings proved so strong and fast to flow, you beat me to my deadline date.

I was planning to write about the refugee crisis, but I have to file each week’s copy by Monday, and last Sunday on RTÉ news there was one of the demonstrators on the streets of Dublin, showing the colour of her Irish compassion, saying how she remembered the history of her own people.

That’s when I knew I was too late, but never have I been so delighted to be out of date. I’d been thinking about those horrific Famine ships, loaded with the haggard starving masses, leaving Ireland to find a better life elsewhere.

When your starving forebears fled their blighted bare fields, did they go to the ships as refugees or economic migrants hoping for a better life with more opportunity in America?

When you watch the huddled masses at European borders on the TV news, can you tell which is a refugee and which a migrant? For a reason that completely escapes me, some of you out there feel that people fleeing a war zone are important, while others searching for a better life are irrelevant.

Please, I beg you, do not waste a second of your lives pondering such a quandary, because nobody leaves the security of their home, their family, their culture and country to strap themselves to trucks, crowd their kids onto lethal inflatable dinghies or walk hundreds upon hundreds of painful miles unless the alternative is to die a miserable death.

What we do need to think of is the dignity of human beings, not the difference between them. Back in England and here in Ireland I often hear Daily Mail readers muttering about how “…we’re only a small island”.

Yes indeed, and as an Englishman living in Ireland, I have often been held culpable for the horrors of the Famine, when this country’s population fell from 8.2 million to 4 million.

There is room here. One of the things I adore about Ireland is that, more than any other European country I’ve visited, we have so much empty space.

From vacant lots in city centres to the thousands of acres of unused farmland, I love it all, yet would happily deprive myself of that joy if the loss of it gave homes to desperate human beings.

To read Charlie’s column in full, see this week’s Galway City Tribune.