He was a 15-year-old who came to Ireland from Nigeria over a decade ago. He had a lovely smile and a loving family, was popular with his Tyrrelstown school friends and played soccer with Shelbourne FC. On Good Friday he got into a row, sparked by racist jibes, with two Irishmen outside a house at Mount Garrett Rise. Before he knew what was happening, Toyosi Shitta-bey was stabbed several times in the chest, He died an hour later at Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown.
According to initial reports, Blanchardstown gardaí have been concerned about tensions in Tyrrelstown – where 50 per cent of residents are non-Irish – and were thinking in terms of a racist crime. Their investigations quickly led to the arrest of brothers Paul (38) and Michael (23) Barry, the former charged with manslaughter and the latter under Section 11 of the Firearms and Offensive Weapons Act for possession of a hockey stick. Both were released on bail.
What became apparent very soon after the mindless killing of Toyosi Shitta-bey was the haste with which everyone – from gardaí and local politicians to local Muslim and Nigerian community leaders – insisted that the killing was not about racism, and appealed for calm.
I’m writing this after returning from a postgraduate conference on migration studies at DCU, where a leading Dutch sociologist spoke about integration without mentioning racism even once. Racism, it seems, is increasingly becoming unmentionable.
I do not wish to use Shitta-bey’s killing to make political capital, but it is important to note how quickly a crime that seemed patently racist became “not specifically a racist attack” according to Dr Muhammad Umar al-Qadri.
Despite the rallying of the Tyrrelstown community around the Shitta-beys and the shows of solidarity, not naming racism where it clearly stands takes us back to an age before interculturalism, when Irish people were convinced that there was no racism in Ireland ‘until these people came’.
Migration studies scholars speak about integration without pointing at the State’s racist categorisation of migrant populations, and without linking restrictive immigration and asylum policies with the street-level racism that brought about Shitta-bey’s death.
What is not racist about two grown men insulting a young Nigerian schoolboy and stabbing him several times in the chest? How can such a wanton act turn from murder to manslaughter? Why were the killers granted bail? And – most importantly – why is everyone so afraid of the ‘R’ word?
In Britain, the murder of Stephen Lawrence galvanised a powerful anti-racism campaign and led to the MacPherson Report, which highlighted ‘institutional racism’ in the police force. Though the campaign did not bring Lawrence back to life and did not stop the British government from enacting its own draconian migration policies, anti-racism is not dead in Britain. But here in Ireland, we are pretending that if we don’t call it by name, racism will disappear.
Many Irish-African people are justifiably angry. As Benedicta Attoh said at the DCU conference, Shitta-bey came to Ireland at the age of four; he could have been born here and be an Irish citizen. Many young African people are afraid to leave home after dark, because whether or not they are Irish citizens, racism lurks on every street corner.
It shouldn’t be this way. We all need to mount a vigorous campaign against it – starting with naming the problem – before it’s too late.
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 Éireann
