There’s never anything ‘casual’ about racism !

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Many people try to camouflage their racism by prefixing it with the word ‘casual’, but some words just do not belong together. Casual racism is as mismatched a combination as ‘accidental starvation’ or ‘inadvertent massacre.’

Trouble is we’re all casual about racism, in different ways. There are so many strains of racism manifesting themselves at the moment, it seems natural, almost human, to want to gauge it; measure it; describe this kind of racism as different to that one. Yet there is no such thing as racism-lite.

I’d been planning to write a piece about refugees seeking asylum in Ireland. A group who arrived in 2000 were assigned to a privately-run Direct Provision centre in Salthill. They arrived here looking for freedom, safety, dignity and a chance to build a life, the same basic human rights that the Irish have sought and gained all over the world.

Upon arrival they were told that their applications would be processed in six months, so I very much doubt they thought they’d still be there 14 years later, having raised nearly an entire generation on €19 a week per adult.

Families are forced to eat food that appears to them unhealthy and foreign, while being denied the basic human right to cook for their children.

Then something wonderful happened. Instead of having to wag my scribbling finger in an unattractive way, the plight of refugees in Ireland became news. Having woken up to the injustice being perpetrated, the Irish are marching on the streets to protest.

For too long I feared I’d have to watch a Prime Time Special at some indeterminate time in the future, wherein the shameful plight of these people would be revealed, offering Ireland another opportunity to self-flagellate on a national scale, muttering about how this could have been possible, this awful terrible tragic way of running things.

No offence, but ye lads are great at that. Yet it didn’t happen because people like me and former Supreme Court Judge Catherine McGuinness, who predicted that a future government would end up apologising for the damage done by the current system, were wrong.

Ireland’s on the case, but it took a while. Our ‘casual’ racism of turning our collective heads for years, allowing such a regime to survive, is no longer acceptable to the Irish. We all agree that private companies running holding pens for humans is not the way to go.

Yahoo! The times they are a-chaaang-in’ and all that.

But oops – what’s this?

Oh no.

My chin drops through the floor, closely followed by my morale. Last week Declan Tierney wrote in this noble rag about Councillor Michael Fahy’s wish that when they finally build the Gort to Tuam motorway, the 500 construction jobs won’t go to ‘foreigners’.

Oh. Oh my god. I feel so sad.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.