There seemed to be universal agreement that the Roma families who have camped on the M50 should indeed be deported, despite being EU citizens. Is this part of the turning tide against those migrants increasingly constructed as ‘illegal’?
Let me reiterate: when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU last year, Ireland followed other EU states in forbidding Romanians and Bulgarians to work here without work permits. It seems we are already ‘flooded’ by labour migrants from the EU 10. While Romanian nationals, including Roma, were entitled to seek asylum in Ireland prior to their states joining the EU, they are now in a worse position – not allowed to seek asylum, work, or live here as EU citizens.
The Roma group’s claim – supported by the Dublin Traveller centre Pavee Point – that if they are deported their lives would be hazardous was met by officialdom, media and ordinary citizens alike by citing assurances from the Romanian Ambassador that they face no hardship in contemporary Romania.
If this is the case, then how come that on 26 April 2007 the European Court of Human Rights delivered judgments in two cases concerning anti-Romani pogroms that took place in Romania in the 1990s? And how come the 2007 Unicef report ‘Roma Children in South East Europe’ noted that “Roma children suffer from poverty, discrimination and a lack of prospects for their future in eight states of South East Europe including Romania”?
According to Unicef, Roma children are among the poorest and most excluded members of society, lacking access to adequate housing, healthcare, education or social services. A significant number are not registered at birth. Widespread discrimination and physical segregation keep Roma on the margins of society and help perpetuate the cycle of poverty and exclusion from one generation to the next.
In addition, in 2003 the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child examined Romania’s progress on children’s rights. While the committee welcomed some positive developments, it expressed concern at the negative attitudes and prejudices of the general public, in the political discourse and media representations, as well as at incidents of police brutality and discriminatory behaviour on the part of some teachers and doctors.
Roma people were targeted by the wartime fascist Romanian government and deported en masse, together with northern Romanian Jews (including members of my own family), to Transnistria, a large reservation in southern Ukraine. These proud nomadic people continue to be treated by Romania and other Eastern European states as what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘human waste’. The production of human waste (that is, those not allowed to stay) is, Bauman reminds us, an inevitable outcome of modernisation and economic progress. As Ireland joins the global world, it also partakes in human waste disposal, ridding itself of those people deemed not useful to its further economic growth.
The language of the media reports of the deportations was dry and factual: on 24 July at 5am, 30 gardai came to the Roma encampment at the M50. The Roma had been offered the option of voluntary repatriation to Romania. About 70 Roma took up this option; 35 remained at the roundabout. The Roma who took up the option to leave were put up at Balseskin Reception Centre and flown back to Romania.
The Roma who remained camped on the M50, however, were not to be accommodated, the Minister for Justice said plainly, because if we do so – as the Romanian embassy has assured him – ‘thousands more will come’. After all, Ireland welcomes migrants only if they work to support the further growth of ‘our way of life’. But these EU citizens were not allowed to work or contribute, and for me, deporting them evokes frightening shades of the Final Solution.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Eirean
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Eirean
