Michael KellyEditor’s Comment with Michael Kelly
This week a poignant re-enactment of a ‘famine walk’ took place with people making the 100-mile journey from Strokestown, Co. Roscommon to the Dublin docklands.
The walk commemorates the starving tenants who were given a choice by their landlord Major Mahon to go to the local workhouse, emigrate through ‘assisted passage’ or starve. After days of walking along the towpaths of the Royal Canal to Dublin, the men, women and children were put on boats to Liverpool, and from there were bound for Quebec aboard four ‘coffin ships’.
Instead of booking his tenants on passenger ships, Mahon placed them on cargo ships. An estimated 50% did not survive the journey. Ironically, these people initially travelled to Liverpool on boats loaded with grain from Ireland. They are known to this day as the “missing 1,490”.
An Gorta Mór casts a long shadow over Irish history and has motivated countless thousands of Irish missionaries and aid workers to spend their lives far from the land of their birth helping those who have nothing. Britain’s indifference to the plight of the Irish during the Great Famine also contributed to poisoning relations between the two islands.
You might say our history of repression, famine and dispossession gives us a preferential option for those in troubled parts of the world who are suffering.
I was haunted by the images this week of hundreds of African migrants helplessly sinking to their deaths in the sea as their modern-day coffin ships gave way. We’ve come to think of the Mediterranean Sea as a pleasant part of a package holiday in Spain or Italy. For these desperate migrants, however, it has become a mass grave. Think about it: almost 2,000 people have already lost their lives this year making the perilious journey: men, women and children. Families with hopes and dreams desperate to flee famine, conflict and persecution in their homelands.
How could Irish people not be moved to compassion? In the Christian context, too, there is a parallel: think of the frightened and bewildered Holy Family of Joseph, Mary and Jesus when they fled to Egypt. Our Christian empathy – and the knowledge that part of our Saviour’s earthly life was as an asylum seeker – must motivate us to demand that politicians act.
Some European governments have publicly criticised attempts by Malta and Italy to save migrants in sinking boats, the logic being that this only encourages people to make the dangerous journey. The consequence is, of course, that the migrants are left to sink to their terrifying deaths at the bottom of the sea.
The rescue operations have been scaled back as the European Union (EU) has cut off the funding. There is momentum to restart the rescue missions. This must happen as a matter of urgency. But this is only the first part of the jigsaw.
European governments need to be more generous in welcoming desperate asylum seekers from troubled parts of the world. Ireland is a wealthy country, Europe is a wealthy place. Sure, austerity has hit many people hard, some will say “we must only look after our own people”. But where is the sense of common humanity?
Mercy and compassion
We must find within ourselves – each of us – the mercy and compassion that the Great Famine has hardwired in to the Irish psyche. Irish politicians should take the lead in pushing for a more humane immigration system across Europe. We can no longer turn away as if this crisis is merely a problem for Italy and Malta to sort out.
European integration has, by and large, been a stunning success: it has created a continent that is free, prosperous and at peace. But, our ‘fortress Europe’ approach is failing us and diminishing our decency. Future generations will look back at this current catastrophe: they will wonder what the Irish people at the time did. We shouldn’t be found wanting.