Roots are where you grow from – not what tie you down

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

We live in strange times in Ireland, when Roma gypsies cannot have blond children and it’s newsworthy that a man accused of a serious crime is also in possession of a university degree.

There’s no need to rake over the ashes of the story of the two children who were taken from their parents because they didn’t look like them – and anyway the definitive analysis of that has to come from a full investigation.

But it will take some explaining as to why a comment on a journalist’s website could prompt such a dramatic response when issues of child welfare are long-fingered every day of the week.

Until a future generation finally conquers cloning, there is no onus on parents to have children in their own likeness – so why should those from impoverished backgrounds be treated any differently?

If a middle-class family adopts a child from a foreign country – a child that clearly doesn’t look like them – would they be subjected to a swoop on the streets as they go about their business?

Thankfully and rightfully, not in a million years – but the Roma are apparently fair game because they are so stereotyped that anyone who isn’t dark-eyed and dark-skinned must belong to someone else.

If the Gardaí came to our door looking for proof that our boys were ours, I’d have difficulty showing them anything more than photographs going back over the last 16 years in which they and us are all included in the same shot.

I certainly wouldn’t be in a position to lay hands on their birth certs, and I couldn’t remember their birth weight the week they were born, never mind a decade and a half later.

Obviously they are now old enough at 14 and 15 to tell any authorities that they are not being held against their will and that they don’t actually have biological parents in some other part of the world.

But I’d have had the same difficulties in proving my parentage when they were two and three as I would now – and yet funnily enough, I don’t think they’d have been removed from the family home in quite the same way.

Social stereotyping had already raised its head a week earlier when a man was charged with the murder of Elaine O’Hara – and the most noteworthy aspect of his description was that he was a graduate of an NUI University.

If the accused man was from Ballyfermot, would the media have diligently reported that he got three honours in his Junior Cert?

But because Graham Dwyer is ‘an architect businessman’, this became an integral part of the story – as though ‘architect businessmen’ are some superior form of life.

The tragedy here isn’t Mr Dwyer’s occupation – it’s that the O’Hara family have lost their daughter. It would make it any easier or more traumatic for them if the man accused of killing her was a doctor or a docker.

All of us – and most of all, in these cases, the Gardaí and the media – should be very careful about jumping to conclusions, just because of an individual’s socio-economic background.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.