Like everyone else, I was appalled by the revelations on RTE’s Prime Time Invest-igates on 30 May about the impact of Government cuts on disabled people and their carers - so appalled that I felt unable to watch the whole programme.
I was distressed by the stories of the parents of a Downs Syndrome boy going hungry because the mother’s carer allowance was cut by €16 a week; of the woman who had to wait more than a year for an MRI scan, leading to her back deteriorating past the possibility of operation; and of the mother who had to carry her adolescent son upstairs for a bath – the son’s scoliosis beyond operative repair because the waiting list was simply too long.
On the following night, Minister for Health Dr James Reilly was in the studio to react to the findings and was very sympathetic, commiserating with the families and promising action. The following day the Taoiseach promised, in his usual unspecific way, that “the Government will know the scale of the priority it can give to those with an intellectual disability and children with special needs on completion of its consideration of the review of public spending” - meaning I am not sure exactly what.
Minister Reilly was reassuring and comforting ,but I wonder how many viewers noticed his throwaway remark, explaining the delay in operating on the boy with scoliosis on the number of ‘cultural circumcisions’ performed in Crumlin Children’s Hospital. Yet again, immigrants are being blamed for the shortcomings of the system.
The French sociologist Etienne Balibar calls it ‘crisis racism’. Viewing immigration as a problem and linking every social problem - from employment and accommodation to social security, schooling, health services, criminality and even morality - to the presence of immigrants serves to spread the idea that the reduction (or ending) of immigration would solve ‘our’ problems, which are certainly not of their making.
This explains, for example, the blame the Irish State laid on migrant mothers for the overcrowding of maternity hospitals in the run up to the Citizenship Referendum. And now – almost as an aside – the Minister for Health blames ‘cultural circumcisions’ for the inability of Crumlin Hospital to operate on serious acute cases such as scoliosis.
But there is a twist to the tale. Let me tell you that although I am not a practicing Jew, and although many modern Jewish parents refuse to circumcise their sons, all the male members of my own family have been ‘culturally circumcised’ to fulfil the covenant of the Hebrew God with his people. It is usually done at home when the baby boy is eight days old by an expert ritual circumciser, takes 15 minutes and is relatively painless. Yet nobody speaks of Jewish circumcision today, rather deflecting the problem to those seen as ‘culturally different’ – specifically Muslims and Nigerians.
The Minister’s throwaway remark is spurious on another account, too: according to Crumlin Hospital’s report, circumcisions are generally quick operations and do not require a lengthy hospital stay.
Balibar asks whether we should remain quiet about the link between immigration and racism, or should we rather send home all those ‘foreign bodies’ whose presence gives rise to ‘reactions of rejection’, while assimilating everyone else?
Immigration remains the name of racism, and all the Minister’s goodwill did not prevent him blaming migrants for what we now know for sure is an inadequate and punishing health system.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann.
