migrantwomenpapers by Ronit Lentin

MPHIL IN ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY, TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN IN ASSOCIATION WITH: THE DEPARTMENT OF ETHNIC STUDIES, BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY, BOWLING GREEN, OHIO, USA SUPPORTED BY: THE BRITISH COUNCIL, DUBLIN

WOMEN'S MOVEMENT: MIGRANT WOMEN TRANSFORMING IRELAND Selection of papers from a conference held in Trinity College Dublin, 20-1 March 2003. Conference organisers: Eithne Luibhéid, Department of Ethnic Studies, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, Ronit Lentin, MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin Editors: Ronit Lentin and Eithne Luibhéid Dublin, 2003

Acknowledgements We would like to thank, firstly, our sponsors – the British Council Ireland, especially Angela Crean, Governance and Science Manager, for funding our keynote speaker, Dr Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, of the University of East London. The MPhil. in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin, and the Department of Ethnic Studies, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green Ohio, were extremely generous in their financial support. Many thanks to Jayne Ifekwunigwe, who not only delivered an exciting keynote address, but was also an integral part of the conference, providing presenters with invaluable feedback. Thank you to all the presenters for engaging, together, in a rich debate on methods and substance – the debate will hopefully enrich us all in our future work. Thanks also to audience members for most useful questions and suggestions. Thanks also to Maja Halilovic-Pastuovic, Deirdre Coughlan, and Nicola Jordan, all students with the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, whose administrative assistance was indispensable. Eithne and Ronit would like to thank one another – working in collaboration on this conference was a mutually beneficial experience that extended our work in valuable new directions. We are preparing a jointly edited special issue of selected conference papers for publication by Women’s Studies International Forum – watch that space! Ronit Lentin and Eithne Luibhéid

Contents Acknowledgements

Conference abstracts and biographies

Migrant Women – Ireland in the international division of care Pauline Conroy

Two-tier citizenship – The Lobe and Osayande case Ursula Fraser

Development in anti-trafficking law and policy: their impact on the survivors of trafficking in women. Catherine Kenny

Secreted Lives: Eastern European women and trafficking for sexual exploitation in Ireland Gillian Wylie 41 Migrant Women Transforming the Face of Ireland Dil Wickremasinghe

International Women: Prison experiences in Ireland Christina Quinlan

Filipina nurses working in the Irish Health Services: Do experiences of prejudice affect integration in the workplace and lower self-esteem? Virginie Noël

(En)gendering Ireland’s migratory space Ronit Lentin

Globalization and sexuality: Redrawing racial and national boundaries through discourses of childbearing Eithne Luibhéid

Irish and ‘brown’ – Mixed ‘race’ Irish women’s identity and the problem of belonging Angeline Morrison

The Provision of Health Services in Ireland to Women Refugees Who Have Survived Gender-Based Torture Inbal Sansani

“I remember when years ago in Italy…”: Italian women in Dublin telling the diaspora. Carla De Tona

ABSTRACTS / BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AkiDwA - Asserting African identity and womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rights in a hostile environment African women encounter multiple forms of discrimination in Ireland today. Not only have they to contend with negative media reports and a rapidly changing and very hostile legal environment (all of which serve to exclude them from integrating into mainstream society), many are also marginalised by their male colleagues who seek to represent the views of all Africans. The xenophobic attacks on Africans and migrants (both verbal and physical all of which are perpetrated by institutional racist policies and practices) are designed to make living in Ireland as uncomfortable an experience as possible in the hope that migrants will live the country in the shortest time possible. The African males (and many non-African spouses of African women) strive to dominate women and to keep them in a dependent position in as far as possible. Despite this many African women, while living in daily fear continue to struggle with dignity in this environment of duel discrimination. They work, many in low paying but essential jobs that the Irish public feel are below them. They earn a living when given the opportunity; they support children and families both in Ireland and also their home countries. They stand tall against the barrage of negativity that they encounter on a daily basis and through their example and attitude strive to create a better future for their children and the next generation of Africans. AkiDwA was established to network, support and advocate on behalf of all African women regardless of national, ethnic or religious background, socio economic or legal status. Through its various project AkiDwA has challenged racism, promoted positive stereotypes for African women and challenged inappropriate subservient cultural roles which men attribute to the African woman. Pauline Conroy Migrant Women â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ireland in the International Division of Care The international recruitment of over 40,000 migrant workers into Ireland has been transforming a relatively homogeneous labour market. Concentrated in crisis sectors of the economy, temporary migrant nurses, childcare workers and care attendants are providing the paid care deficit which keeps the economy turning. Posing new cultural and social questions for trade unions and labour movement development, migrant women workers are not yet visible in analytical and theoretical thinking. The care chains which stretch from Asia to Ireland, connect women of diverse origins in a new division of labour â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the redivision of care work. This topic is explored drawing in part on research undertaken by the Ralaheen researchers during 2002 on migrant workers experiences in Ireland (full paper below). Pauline Conroy is Director of the research company Ralaheen Ltd and guest lecturer in European Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Social Work in University College, Dublin. She is former editor of the European Union Annual Reports on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men. Her publication Reflecting at the Crossroads was prepared in the context of the Draft National Plan for Women 2001-2005, of which she was technical editor. She is the author of a 2002 discussion paper on Ethical Issues in the measurement of race and ethnicity for the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.

Carla De Tona Italian Women in Dublin Telling the Diaspora Italian immigrants in Ireland represent an exceptional case in the Irish history of out-migration. From the end of the nineteenth century they gave rise to a relevant chain migration phenomenon from the central region of Italy (80% of all Italians) which has been constant so far. Today there are 5,000 Italian citizens officially residing in Ireland, over half (57%) in Dublin. They have been economically successful. They occupied and monopolized the economic niche of food catering activities, first with Fish and Chips shops and more recently with Italian restaurants. Despite the economic success, and more recent waves of migration, Italians have remained an invisible community, whose social and cultural needs have not found proper ground of expression. This can be arguably imputed to othering processes under which internal forms of diversity were subjugated, in order to functionally strengthen Irish people’s own sense of identity; moreover because Italianess represented a ‘proper’ constitutive outside, it become along the way incorporated from inside as a very ‘Irish’ form of Italianess. Quite predictably Italian migrant women, especially from the oldest migrant families, have remained doubly invisible. Ignored by the majority of the host country, they have been trapped in traditional gender roles of the Italian community. Not only metaphorically, they were kept in the ‘back kitchen’, a private and subjugated area of expression. Yet it would be a further discriminatory bias to limit any account of these women to this level of understanding. Women too carry multiple identities. Narrative analysis as a more sensitive devise of analysis, allows consideration of how, from these unprivileged roles, Italian women successfully managed not only their family business but also their personal lives. This has a striking parallel with the history of the entire community of Italian immigrants in Dublin, which would support Anthias’ argument for a need to understand gender roles, as a group reproduction in a selective way of the symbolic relations it lives within (Anthias 1998). Moreover women’s ability as narrators-authors allows them to assume central roles as masters of the memory and narrative annals of the Italian migrant groups (full paper below). Carla De Tona graduated from Perugia University, Italy, in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy in 1998, with a final thesis on Urban Anthropology. She completed an M.Phil. in Ethnic and Racial Studies in Trinity College Dublin in 2000, and is currently in her second year of a PhD in the Trinity College Sociology Department, researching Italian migrant women in Ireland and Germany. Ursula Fraser First and Second Class Citizenship Under the Irish Constitution, all people born on the island of Ireland are automatically entitled to Irish citizenship. Over the last few years, in Ireland there has been an increase in the number of births to noncitizen parents. Such children are entitled to Irish citizenship and, therefore, the protection of the Irish Constitution. One such protection is the right to family life and this includes the right to have the company and care of one’s parents in Ireland. The government, however, has decided to challenge such rights by attempting to deport the non-citizen parents of an Irish child. This risqué decision was challenged in the High Court on a number of grounds and the State won mainly on the ground that the integrity of the asylum and immigration processes had to be respected. The government has concluded, without any concrete statistics, that there is wide-scale abuse of the asylum and immigration process whereby women are arriving to Ireland either pregnant or with plans to become pregnant in order to get residency and work rights based on their child’s Irish citizenship. The State won its appeal to the Supreme Court, and the result is likely to be very troubling. Apart from the stigmatisation of “foreign-looking” women, a policy of first and second-class 6

citizenship will result. Discrimination against a group of Irish children because of the nationality of their parents is unacceptable. What is more worrying is that this new departure is based on popular myth and unquantified fears about the impact on our immigration system (full paper below). Ursula Fraser is Refugee Officer with Amnesty International Irish Section. In 2001/2 she worked as Field Supervisor of the International Process and Justice Project based at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania. Having graduated from law at Trinity College Dublin in 1993, she was called to the Irish Bar in 1995. Since then she has worked as Legal Officer with the Irish Refugee Council and Advocacy Officer at the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) in Brussels. She conducted research at University College Dublin, commissioned by the Irish Government – a refugee law comparative study of the 15 EU Member States. She was awarded a Trinity College Legal Research Fellowship and worked at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Dublin. She has taught international and human rights law at Trinity College Dublin EU law at the Boston University International Programme based in Dublin. She is author of Asylum Law and Policy In Ireland - A Critical Guide (Amnesty 2000), Ireland and the European Asylum Debate (Practice and Procedure, Roundhall, July 2000) and “Judicial Review in Ireland” in No Welcome Here – Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Ireland and Britain (Regency Press, Belfast). She has also completed a Masters degree (M.Litt, TCD, 2000) on the temporary protection of asylum seekers in a possible mass influx situation. Breda Gray Women, Migration and Life Narratives “The present we live in is built from past events” (Tonkin, 1992: 9). How has Ireland’s experience of mass out-migration in the 1950s been incorporated into a present marked by rapid social change and immigration? What insights might the life-narratives of older Irish women who witnessed/experienced out-migration in the 1950s offer with regard to questions of collective memory and uses of ethnohistory in the present? What aspects of migration (in the contexts of the sending and receiving countries) can these women’s narratives illuminate with particular reference to relationships between migrancy and women’s lives? What are the problems with making such connections? In this paper I discuss the life narratives of two Irish women and their memories of emigration in the 1950s in order to address the above questions. These life narratives were collected as part of the Irish Centre for Migration project, Breaking the Silence: staying at home in an emigrant society. Breda Gray is Senior Lecturer, Women’s Studies in the Department of Sociology, University of Limerick. Prior to that she was Head of Research at the Irish Centre for Migration Studies at the National University of Ireland, Cork. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe Roots and Routes: Rethinking Gendered African Diaspora(s) in the Global Age This presentation will address the ways in which gendered processes of transnationalism and globalisation have forced a rethinking of traditional European immigration paradigms. First, I reconfigure and reimagine temporal and spatial dimensions of the African Diaspora, within which there are compound and multiple forms. In so doing, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which the historical ideas, economic processes and political projects of Africa and the African Diaspora are (and always have been) mutually constituted. In order to test the relevance of this reformulation in contemporary everyday lived contexts, I will then discuss the newest layers of African diasporas which have resulted from recent dispersals from continental Africa to Europe, particularly the clandestine exodus of West Africans from Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar to Southern Spain 7

and trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy. These gendered migrations are frequently situated within more general asylum and immigration or global sex work discourses respectively. I argue for their racialised recognition as 'new' African diasporas. Finally, I will consider the present social status and future economic and political potential of 'new' African diasporic communities in Ireland. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe is a Reader in Anthropology at the University of East London, U.K. Her research interests include comparative 'mixed race' theories and identity politics, 'new' African diasporas, and cultural and heritage tourism. She has published widely on these issues. Her most recent publications include Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of 'Race', Nation and Gender (Routledge, 1999) and the edited 'Mixed Race' Studies Reader (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current projects are visual and ethnographic research on the discrepant management of public memories in Cape Town, South Africa as well as theoretical work on African diaspora(s) in the global age. Jane Jameson Roma women in Ireland: breaking down barriers or constructing new ones? This paper examines the potentially empowering relationship between indigenous Irish Travellers – traditionally Ireland’s ‘Other’ - and Roma refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. In particular it focuses on the role of Traveller and Roma women in initiating and developing this relationship. It will indicate ways in which the discriminatory practices and discourses, and processes of exclusion and racialization inherent in the national legal system may hinder and discourage this fragile alliance. The Travellers have formal citizenship but in reality are marginalized from the institutions and structures of Irish society. How to maintain identity and achieve true equality is thus a question for both groups. Will the Roma and the Travellers identify, co-operate and co-exist in the Irish context? Or will the presence of the Roma create new hierarchies of exclusions and ever deeper and complex conflicts of identity and the fear of further stigmatisation by association? Will the Roma simply become the Other’s Other in Ireland? The treatment of Roma refugees by established Roma groups in other EU countries suggests the latter is the most likely, though not the only, outcome. Jane Jameson graduated from the University of Abertay Dundee in 2001 with a First Class Honours Degree in Law and was awarded a Major Scottish Studentship from the Students Awards Agency for Scotland (now AHRB). She is currently working towards a PhD at the University of Abertay. The thesis title is “The regulation of the Roma as a paradigm for the regulation of groups of people in a post national context.” Catherine Kenny Developments in Anti-Trafficking Law and Policy: Their Impact on the Survivors of Trafficking. Every year up to 4 million people worldwide are trafficked to work in slavery like conditions as bonded labourers, sex workers, domestic workers and beggars. The majority of trafficked persons are women. This paper will focus on international instruments drawn up to combat trafficking from the perspective of the human rights of trafficked women. Although trafficking in persons has been recognised by the United Nations as a contemporary form of slavery, the emphasis of most states is on apprehending the transnational criminal gangs involved in trafficking and combating illegal migration rather than providing assistance to trafficked women. Although Ireland was one of the first states to sign the Protocol to prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons (2000), there are no measures in place in domestic law and policy to address the problems faced by women who have survived trafficking. In particular, many women 8

may not return to their country of origin because they fear harm at the hands of their traffickers or they may be ostracised from their community on account of the activity they have been involved in. While Ireland has introduced legislation, which appears to deal with trafficking in persons (Illegal immigrants (Trafficking) Act), rather, it was drawn up to prevent persons being smuggled into this country. The paper will also argue that denying a safe, legal means of migration, leads many women to avail of illegal means of migration and consequently to become easy targets for traffickers. In conclusion, some provisions to protect the human rights of trafficked persons, which should be included in any future Irish legislation will be suggested (full paper below). Catherine Kenny is researcher and PhD Candidate at the Irish Gentre for Human Rights, NUI, Galway. She was previously a legal officer in the Irish Refugee Council. She was a member of the Executive Committee of ICCL and Convenor of ICCL's Womens committee where she was involved in the production of their publication Women and the Refugee Experience: Towards a Statement of Best Practice. Ronit Lentin Strangers and Strollers: (En)gendering Ireland’s Migratory Space Psychological distancing was the first step to annihilation, as Bauman (1989) argued in relation to the Holocaust. Side by side by instituting multiculturalist policies to cope with cultural difference, the Irish government is responding to increasing numbers of asylum applications by strategies of psychological distancing (calling asylum seekers ‘bogus refugees’ and/or ‘illegal immigrants’), physical distancing (dispersing them to direct provision hostels, providing pregnant asylum seekers with ante natal services in a separate installation somewhere in the wilds of ‘north county Dublin’ prior to dispersal), and finally deportation, attempting to remove Ireland’s new strangers, by, among other tactics, reversing the permission to remain for ‘non national’ parents of ‘Irish born’ children. This paper first explores the role of social theory in positing the gendering of Ireland’s new migratory spaces via the bodies of ‘non national’ mothers. Employing David Goldberg’s (2002) concept of the two traditions of thinking about racial states, naturalism and historicism, I interrogate the deeply gendered character of racial subjection and the rule of racial subjects. Secondly, I explore the role of socio(logical) researchers as both ‘strangers’ and ‘strollers’ researching migrant women as ‘strangers’ with (baby) strollers. Social researchers and their subjects may have a role in interrupting the order of Irish late modernity, which keeps constructing new classificatory schemas – such as ‘nationals’ versus ‘non nationals’ – that are about the insistence on epistemological order in the face of disorder. Migrant mothers and their ‘Irish born’ children can be complicit in dragging Irish modernity kicking and screaming into the chaos of the postmodern; similarly, stranger-stroller researchers may destabilise ordered socio(logical) narratives about the other (full paper below). Ronit Lentin is course coordinator of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Department of Sociology, TCD. Her books include Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), Gender and Catastrophe (1997) (Re)searching Women: Feminist Research Methodologies in the Social Sciences in Ireland (with Anne Byrne, 2000), Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland (with Robbie McVeigh, 2002) and Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (with Nahla Abdo, 2002). She has published extensively on gender and racism in Irish society and other topics. Eithne Luibhéid Globalization and Sexuality: Redrawing Racial and National Boundaries Through Discourses of Childbearing 9

Challenging standard accounts of globalization that ignore sexuality, race and gender, this paper examines how childbearing discourses and practices have provided a means to redraw racial and national boundaries that have become destabilized. Focusing on the Irish Republic, I show that historically, women were annexed to postcolonial nationalism through their role as child bearers, understood in racial and national terms, and institutionalized in social policy and law. Today, in the context of accelerated globalization, the Irish government requires new strategies to construct the nation as a sovereign space. Discourses and practices targeting asylum seeker women’s childbearing have provided a means to reconstitute the Republic as a sovereign space with a legitimate national government—and also generated new modes of racialization and racial hierarchies. Situating women’s sexualized bodies at the heart of racial and national boundary-marking processes in a global era, I conclude by describing some ways that these developments have been contested (full paper below). Eithne Luibhéid is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her research focuses on the connections among immigration control, sexual regulation, and racial formation in a globalizing world. Her book, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2002. Clare McAree Domestic Violence and Women from Ethnic Minorities This thesis proposes that, in relation to the experience of domestic violence, women from ethnic minorities encounter a number of factors which make their experience different from that of women in the majority population. A sample of six Nigerian women was taken as a case study to test this hypothesis. The research findings supported the proposed hypothesis as six areas of concern were found. These concerns were: there is a high level of violence in Nigerian society; lacking a clear definition of domestic violence and coming from a society where domestic violence is a taboo subject, Nigerian women are perceived as being in denial about the abuse that they are experiencing; in the face of the multitude of problems that Nigerian women encounter in coming to Dublin domestic violence is not being given priority; lack of knowledge of services available to deal with the effects of domestic abuse and limited language skills are major deterrents in the disclosure of domestic abuse on the part of Nigerian women; services in place to deal with domestic violence are culturally insensitive towards Nigerian women; and the issue of status limits a Nigerian woman’s ability to confront the issue of domestic violence. In consideration of these findings a number of recommendations have been proposed. These recommendations focus on those involved in service provision for women experiencing domestic violence. Natalie McDonnell Central and Eastern European Women Migrants to Ireland: Reconfiguring the and Pushing the Boundaries of Social Citizenship

Ethnoscape

This paper will begin with a discussion of women migrants from Central and Eastern European countries to Ireland; patterns of migration between the region and Ireland and charting the ways in which Central and Eastern European migrants have formed networks and communities in Ireland. The paper is partly based on data from work with migrant women in an Information/Advice centre around welfare and status issues based in Dublin and draws on case-study and interview material with women who accessed the service for information and advice. The case-studies demonstrate both the difficulties faced by these women as they decipher 10

their way through the Irish immigration and welfare systems and the ways in which they managed to challenge and circumvent the systems they face(d). The paper explores the ways in which gender is mis(conceived) in state structures which reinforces the barriers imposed by boundaries of nationality and the layers of citizenship/residency. Natalie McDonnell completed the M.Phil. in Ethnic and Racial Studies in 2000 and worked as an Information Officer with Emigrant Advice, a drop in service for migrants in Dublin, between 2001 and 2002. She currently works as a Project/Policy Officer at Treoir, the Federation of Services for Unmarried Parents and their Children. Angeline Morrison Irish & Brown: Mixed 'Race' Irish Women and the Question of Belonging. 'The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself - who, then, in this fearful mathematics is trapped?' (James Baldwin 1984). Man: 'They should send them all back to Nigeria. DJ: 'But they're not all from Nigeria, are they? Man: 'It's no matter, they're all bloody blacks.' (From a local radio phone-in show, Dublin 1999). Despite being born in Ireland, or being 'culturally' Irish, many mixed 'race' Irish people feel they can never properly belong. This paper seeks to examine some of the lived experiences of Irish women of mixed 'race', whose brown skin reads as evidence of migration and introduces chaos into their acceptance as 'Irish'. Questions will be asked about their own understandings of the (contested) notion of 'Irishness', and their experiences in relation to their own visibly 'different' bodies. I suggest that the formation of identities in the case of mixed 'race' Irish people can be usefully considered to take place through language (particularly the language of everyday racism), thus a largely psychoanalytic framework will be used. The paper will question some of the hidden assumptions behind the thinking and attitudes towards mixed 'race' people that problematises their acceptance as 'Irish'. These assumptions include western society's centuries-old privileging of the ocular, and the kind of fetishistic loyalty to the false logocentric binary of 'black/white', and what is considered as the recent 'whitening' of the Irish. Finally, following Bhabha's reconceptualisation of hybridity, this paper will suggest the figure of the mirror for mixed 'race' Irish people. This mirror reflects something back to white Irish society that it would prefer not to see: the reflection of its own coveted whiteness, worn on a brown body. Angeline Morrison comes from a background in Art History, Visual Culture and Psychoanalysis, and got her Ph.D. on Valentine’s Day. Her thesis, “Liminal Blankness: Mixing 'Race' and Space in Monochrome's Psychic Surface,” suggests that blankness in the visual arts (e.g. monochrome paintings such as Yves Klein's) is a space of indeterminacy and eternal deferral of signification, and as such is structurally homologous to the Mixed 'Race' subject's status within racialised society. Siobhan Mullally Recognising Gender-Based Persecution: Engendering Asylum Law in Ireland This paper would examine the limits and potential of asylum law in recognising gender-based persecution and the claims of refugee women. Mirroring existing structures in international law, refugee law traditionally failed to recognise the specific forms of persecution experienced by women. The conceptual divisions between the public and the private, underpinning international law, ignored persecution occurring within the family, the community the workplace. A reluctance to criticise ‘cultural traditions’, particularly where such practices and traditions were rooted in religion, meant that denials of women’s human rights were not recognised as such. In the context of asylum law, this has lead to a paralysing relativism that puts sensitivity to cultural difference over the rights or needs of women – a “paradox of multicultural vulnerability” – whereby women and children become the 11

bearers of cultural traditions. It has lead to a kind of traffic in women, through which the males of the dominant and minority cultures signal to each other their recognition and respect for the customs of the other. A reluctance to recognise the universal legitimacy of women’s human rights claims has limited the potential of asylum law to offer protection against persecution. In recent years, attempts have been made in a number of jurisdictions to expand the scope of asylum law, and to challenge the public / private divisions that have denied women’s claims to persecution. Gender guidelines have been adopted in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., attempting to mainstream a gender perspective into the asylum determination process. This paper would examine these developments, highlighting the potential for further reform in the Irish context. Siobhan Mullally is a lecturer in international human rights law at U.C.C. She has previously taught international law in the UK and worked on human rights missions in Pakistan, Kosovo and India. Recent publications include: “Accelerated asylum procedures in Irish law,” in European Public Law (2002); and “Pursuing gender equality: beyond the limits of non-discrimination,” in Costello C (ed.), Equality Law in Europe (2002). Virginie Noël Filipina/Filipino Nurses Working in Ireland According to Tajfel’s social identity theory, belonging to a devalued social group, like a minority ethnic group, should harm one‘s self-esteem. However, studies have shown that members of devalued groups keep a level of self-esteem as high as that of dominant groups. Individuals thus use protective strategies, like attribution of negative events to illegitimate discrimination, to keep a high self-esteem. In this study, the mediating effect of one’s attachment to a country of origin (collectivism) is investigated in relation to prejudice encountered by individuals who have migrated to and work in Ireland. Participants are nurses from the Philippines who have a work permit in Ireland and are employed in Dublin. The Philippines being a collectivist country, we expect to find high levels of self-esteem, because collectivism should act as a protective shield against experienced personal discrimination. Individuals high on collectivism should also be less subjectively integrated in their workplace. These questions will be investigated by questionnaires, and analysed statistically (full paper below). Virginie Noël is currently completing a combined degree-master’s course in Psychology (Licence en Psychologie) at the University of Liège, Belgium. This course culminates in the submission of a thesis, a part of which will be presented at this conference. Her specialisation is the field of Social Psychology. Virginie spent one year at Trinity College with the Erasmus exchange programme in 2000-2001. She was involved in the creation of an anti-discriminatory education programme funded by the Belgian Communeauté Française in 2001-2002. Joan O’Connor The Labour Market Needs and Experiences of Minority Ethnic Groups, Particularly Refugees, In Ireland: A Specific Focus on Refugee Women There has been no systematic research carried out to date on the situation of minority ethnic groups, particularly refugees, on the labour market in Ireland. Initial base-line research was necessary to begin to address a critical gap in our knowledge in relation to the labour market needs and experiences of this group, who experience exclusion from the labour market in other host societies. A review of the literature reveals that within the refugee group women are much less likely to be in employment than men and when in employment are to be found in a narrow range of low-skill and low-pay jobs, often being employed in services, domestic services and in manufacturing. This paper, which places a specific focus on the situation of refugee women, draws on empirical research commissioned by the 12

Equality Authority, and conducted over a period of 10 months from December 2001 to September 2002 by the Women's Education, Research and Resource Centre (WERRC), UCD. It examines their labour market needs and experiences, the particular barriers they face in accessing the labour market, and the core issues that need to be addressed to secure positive labour market outcomes for refugee women. Joan O'Connor has worked in the area of development education and human rights with the Galway One World Centre (GOWC), in Ireland and with the UN Cambodia Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCOHCHR) in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Currently she is working as a Research Officer with the Women's Education, Research and Resource Centre (WERRC), University College Dublin, having completed a Masters of Science degree in Applied Social Research at the Department of Sociology, Trinity College, Dublin. Christina Quinlan International Female Drug Couriers: Prison Experiences in Ireland This paper addresses the concept of identity in relation to international women prisoners and their experiences of imprisonment in Ireland. The paper explores, using the constructs of race, ethnicity and class, the identities of these women, their construction of their own identities, the identities of these women as they are constructed by the Irish legal and penal systems, and their identities as they are constructed by the women’s fellow prisoners, the Irish nationals. The female experience of imprisonment in Ireland has changed in recent years with the opening of the new female prison at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. The impact of these women on this new prison is considered, particularly in relation to the prison’s health and educational services, and in relation to the new prison and its development. This paper is an exploration of the prison experiences of international women imprisoned in Ireland (full paper below). Christina Quinlan works in the School of Communications in DCU where she teaches Research Methods and Cross Cultural Communication. From a background in social research with marginalised groups in Ireland, Christina has undertaken a PhD in Communications, a study of identity and women in prison in Ireland. Freda Quinlan Identity Politics or Strategic Essentialism? The African Women’s Network In this paper I argue that an analysis of the Irish diaspora highlights how notions of Irish identity have been constructed to legitimate Irish nationalism; and more recently how immigration to Ireland from the majority world has led some Irish cultural commentators to expose the fragile basis of Irish identity. I present an overview of the various conceptuatlisation of diaspora and explore the extent to which Ireland can be positioned within the rubric of post-colonial societies. Reflecting on the work of cultural commentators like Fintan O’Toole, Declan Kibberd and others, I argue that what discursively constitutes Irish identity is based on nationalist hegemonic ideologies. Ireland’s ambivalent relationship with the former coloniser has operated to exclude articulations of difference that may constitute a challenge to the nation state. Relating this to the increasing numbers of racialised ethnic minority people resident in the republic, it will be suggested that Ireland’s position within the context of post-colonial societies is presenting a challenge to dominant perceptions of what constitutes Irish identity. While the Irish diasporic experience has expanded notions of cultural identity based on geographical precepts, to what extent can the emergence of an African diasporic space in Ireland be said to further expand notions of Irishness. Ireland has never been a colonising country; as such it has no traditional ties to former colonies. Examinations of minority ethnic collectivities have often failed to interrogate the construction of the ‘majority’. Therefore, this research attempts to disrupt the binary 13

of self and other in the construction of Irish national identity by exploring the effects of diaspora and multiple belongings in relation to an African Women’s Network (AkiDwA) based in Dublin. This research examines the means through which AkiDwA mobilised the concept of difference in a strategically essentialist way in response to macro concerns; and how on a local level the activities of the group challenge myths of both Irish and African homogenity. In the process of asserting an oppositional identity, it is suggested that the executive members of AkiDwA have constructed a common context of struggle out of a myriad of subject positionings that vary depending on their location of articulation. How AkiDwA has forged this collective identity defies essentialist notions of identity based on foundational categories that essentialize African women. Therefore, it is suggested that AkiDwA strategically base their activities on a ‘politics of identification’ (Brah 1991) rather then a politics of identity. Furthermore, taking this position enables AkiDwA to build alliance with diverse groups of women, to mobilise on particular issues, at particular historical moments. Finally it is argued that the strategies employed by AkiDwA are creating new gendered spaces of resistance within the African diaspora in Ireland, and also within the national collectivity (full paper below). Freda Quinlan: Having spent some years away from Ireland my personal experience of migration have initiated my interest in women's activism in new countries of settlement. As a migrant in the UK, I considered my identity as an Irish woman strong, while my recent return to live in Ireland has resulted in a renegotiation of this very identity. Inbal Sansani The Provision of Health Services in Ireland to Women Refugees Who Have Survived GenderBased Torture Women refugees who have survived gender-based torture comprise one of Ireland’s most vulnerable segments of the refugee population. There is widespread agreement regarding the particularities of women refugees’ experiences, including interrelated issues like lack of language training and childcare options. The increasing number of women in Ireland’s refugee community accentuates the disparity between their particular needs and the various services available to them. I propose a holistic and humanitarian approach to the rehabilitation of torture survivors. I will contend that rape as a form of torture is invariably a gendered and ethnicized phenomenon. Because the social constructions of gender and ethnicity manifest themselves in the physical body, women’s bodies are targets of violence. Women who have survived gender-based torture share unique survival and healing needs. I will argue that it is necessary to develop specific policies and programs, as well as an integrated service delivery model, to address the situation of this marginalized group to ensure women’s opportunity to create a healthy life for themselves and their families. I will posit community-based approaches to torture rehabilitation that have been successful in Canada and Nigeria to advocate for the implementation of appropriate services to these women survivors in Ireland (full paper below). Inbal Sansani has graduated from the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C. in May 2003. She earned an MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at TCD in 2000, and a BA in War, Gender and Religion in the Middle East at Duke University. She has written on the experiences of Palestinian women political prisoners and migrant women. Her legal articles have covered the prosecution of war criminals, Native American land rights in the U.S., and civil and political rights in Hong Kong and China. She will join the law firm of Herrick, Feinstein LLP in September 2003.

Maeve Stokes Cultural Transitions for Women Asylum Seekers and Refugees A major focus of research in refugee mental health has been on the psychological impact of traumatic events in the pre migratory phase. The literature cites numerous studies on the incidence of PTSD where it is perceived as a universal normative reaction to trauma. As a result, concepts drawn from Western models of mental health risk are creating inappropriate ‘sick roles’ for refugees. (Summerfield, 1996) Women refugees have been identified as a particular vulnerable group. (Agger 1995) The distress they experience may not end with escape from their country of origin but can continue in their country of exile. In my experience in providing a service to this group of people, there are a number of specific problems that arise for them in this post migratory phase. In my paper I will explore these problems and the lessons which they suggest for our future practice. Maeve Stokes, M.A., M.Sc., is Head of Psychology Services for Refugees and Asylum seekers, Northern Area Health Board. She has been responsible for the development and provision of these services for the past eight years. Karen M. Smyth and Jean Whyte Parenting alone in Ireland: The Experience of Refugee and Asylum Seeking Women The number of refugees and asylum seekers living in Ireland has risen in recent years. While it is recognised internationally that they face many challenges to their psychosocial well-being little research has been conducted in Ireland. Women who are refugee and asylum seekers and who are parenting alone face additional challenges. This study aims to explore the acculturative and psychosocial stresses experienced by these women and the resulting impact on their children. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirty mothers from Africa and Eastern Europe who are parenting alone in Ireland, and their children, were possible. The participants include women who have arrived in Ireland with some or all of their children and women who have given birth in Ireland. Qualitative analysis has identified a diverse range of factors that impinge on the psychosocial well-being of these mothers, however resilience to adversity has also been identified. This paper will focus on the findings regarding these women’s experience of parenting alone and the impact on their children. Findings highlight that the psychosocial needs of these lone mothers can be viewed as more complex than their Irish counterparts. These findings can contribute to emerging policy regarding refugee and asylum seekers in Ireland. Karen Smyth worked as a research psychologist in Malawi, Central Africa for a number of years in the area of mental health and disability. Her research included an ethnographic study on traditional healing and studies on locally held explanations for mental disturbance. Her current work in The Children's Research Centre focuses on the experiences of refugee and asylum seeking women in Ireland who are parenting alone and their children the experience of growing up in Ireland with a sibling with a disability. Jean Whyte is an Educational Psychologist and was a Senior Lecturer in Psychology in Trinity College before joining The Children's Research Centre. She has many years practical research experience in the area of children and adolescence and has published extensively. Bronwyn Walter Irish Women in the Diaspora: Exclusions and Inclusions Responses and strategies of ‘accommodation, complicity, resistance, struggle, transgression’ (Brah 15

1996:138), which characterise the everyday lives of Irish women living outside Ireland, provide telling and productive parallels with those of migrant women from elsewhere now settling inside. This paper explores some of the complexities and ambiguities in both the positioning of migrant Irish women within the societies of which they become part, and in their own negotiation of changing political, social and economic circumstances. Evidence will relate primarily to Britain, which has the largest recent diasporic Irish population and where the most detailed research has been undertaken to date. Comparisons will also be drawn with Irish women’s experiences in the USA and Australia, using data generated by and for the 2002 Task Force on Policy regarding Emigrants. The concept of diaspora explicitly includes those identifying themselves as Irish over several generations. New findings from the Irish 2 Project, a recent study of the large second-generation Irish population in England and Scotland, will be used to examine narratives of women growing up in ‘Irish’ households and of their subsequent negotiations of identities in adulthood. This provides insights into longitudinal dimensions of migrant experience and the ongoing importance of nation and locality. Bronwen Walter is Professor of Irish Diaspora Studies at Anglia Polytechnic University. She is author of Outsiders inside: whiteness, place and Irish women (Routledge, 2001), and coauthor (with Mary J. Hickman) of the 1997 Commission for Racial Equality report, Discrimination and the Irish Community in Britain. Tanya Ward Hidden Migrations and New Migration Chains: An overview of women’s migration to Ireland Through the globalisation of migration, more countries than ever before have experienced the immigration of peoples with different economic, social and cultural backgrounds. Women play an increasing role in all regions of the world and in all types of migration. This paper provides an overview of spontaneous and controlled contemporary migration movements of women to Ireland. By examining the various types of migration to Ireland – refugee/asylum seeking movements, labour migration, family reunification/family related migration and international students – it is argued that ad hoc immigration procedures have adversely affected women’s entry and presence in Ireland. Moreover, while women have previously remained virtually hidden, they currently occupy a key and prominent role in new migration chains. Tanya Ward is currently the "Asylum Seeker Research and Development Officer" with the City of Dublin VEC. A geography postgraduate of University College Cork, previously she has worked with the Irish Centre for Migration Studies, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and the Irish Refugee Council. Tanya has just finished a report entitled Asylum Seekers in Adult Education and is studying for an LLM in Human Rights in Queens University, Belfast. Dil Wickremasinghe How Do I See Myself? How do I see myself? I am a human being of course! How does the world see me? Woman, Asian, Lesbian, Ex-Jehovah’s Witness – the order may vary depending in which part of the world is looking at me! I have lived in Ireland for the past 3 years. I came here to join my partner whom I met whilst I was working in the Middle East. We were both flight attendants. When we decided to give up flying, we thought of moving to Ireland as she had been away from her family for more years than I had been away from mine. I was reluctant to return to Sri Lanka for numerous reasons. My parents were not speaking to me on account of my sexuality. Then, Sri Lanka has suffered a Civil War for the past 17 years. Homosexuality is considered to be an unlawful act and those found guilty could be imprisoned up to 10 years. Finally, I was very eager to move back to Europe as I was born and lived 16

in Italy till I was 12, hence I always considered myself more European that Asian. My life in Ireland is extremely happy. I am with the love of my life, I adore my job, I have made many friends and I finally feel a sense of belonging to the country I am in. To top it all off we have just bought a house, this is the happiest I have ever been in my life except for one little thing… Being in a relationship with an EU-National, irrespective of their gender, should entitle me to live and work in Dublin without the need for permits. However, as same sex couples are not recognized in Ireland my permit has to be renewed annually so a feeling of impermanence will continue to affect every aspect of our life. Dil Wickremasinghe: 29 year old, Sri Lankan national born in Rome. Moved to Ireland 3 years ago to be with her Irish partner. Presently, fighting for her same sex relationship to be recognized by the Irish Government and to be granted equal rights. Gillian Wylie Secreted Lives: Eastern European Women and the Sex Trade in Ireland There are undoubtedly Eastern European women in Ireland working in the sex industry. The NGO Ruhama has reported encountering 130 Eastern European prostitutes on the streets. Eastern European women’s presence in lap-dancing clubs has become notorious through press coverage. Yet because of the dubious legal position these women inhabit and the secretive practices of the sex industry, little is known about them. This paper will cast light on these women’s lives. Who they are and why they come will be explored, with particular reference to the peculiarly gendered effects of socio-economic breakdown under neo-liberalism in Eastern Europe. The circumstances under which they arrive in Ireland will also be discussed. While the Irish government denies that human trafficking is a problem here, others suggest that some of these women are indeed trafficking victims. This issue requires clarification. While in Ireland prostitutes and lap-dancers lead extremely constrained lives. Their legal status is non-existent or tenuous, those who control the industry purposefully exclude them from wider social contact and they are subject to moral revulsion from their host society. Given these circumstances, the question will be raised as to in what sense these women can be understood as agents at all (full paper below). Gillian Wylie is a lecturer in International Peace Studies at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin. Her research and teaching are in the areas of International Politics, Eastern European Politics and Gender Studies.

Migrant Women – Ireland in the International Division of Care Pauline Conroy

Ralaheen Ltd Unit 21 7-9 Dame Court Exchequer Street Dublin 2 Ireland

Tel 01- 6793400 Fax 01- 6793406 Email : pauline@ralaheen.ie

Introduction Migration into the European Union now accounts for 80% of the overall population growth of the West European part of the Continent of Europe. As the birth rate collapses in countries such as Spain and Italy, Europe is ageing and its supply of young workers is depleting. With the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 to include twenty five different countries, in-migration will take on ever greater importance. Excluding Germany, women account for almost half the migrants moving into the fifteen countries of the European Union. This trend towards the feminisation of migration into the European Union is well illustrated in the case of Ireland – formerly a source of millions of emigrants to the United States, Canada, and Australia. During the 1990’s boom, thousands of Irish women went out to paid employment, remained at work, returned to work or looked for work. In so doing a large care deficit – paid and unpaid -opened up in Ireland. Into this breach, migrant women, and some men, are filling a part of the care deficit which Irish women will not or cannot fill. Migrant women are a link in an international division of care across continents. The care chain connects the au pair/care worker from Eastern Europe, who has left her children in the care of here mother – though to the domestic worker from the Philippines - to the Irish woman with children or older parents going out to full-time paid work, and whose children are minded by an overseas au pair or migrant childcare worker. Globalisation now extends to the international division of care labour across countries. Globalisation transfers the so-called ‘domestic burden’ of care from woman to woman across continental divides. A million more women at work The process of creating economic and monetary union across Member States of the European Union is of greater significance for the status of women in Europe than the EURO which is merely a segment of that wider process. In the year 2000, almost one million women joined the labour force - an increase of three percentage points since 1995. Almost 2.8 million women have entered the European labour forces from inactivity since 1995(European Commission, 2001, 38). Women took more than half the jobs created in Europe in 2000 and occupied 60% of all jobs created since 1995. In other words of every ten extra jobs created in Europe since 1995, six were held by women. The European growth economy is highly dependent on women agreeing to accept to work under the prevailing conditions on offer. More than half the jobs created in Europe in 2000 and 60% of jobs since 1995 have gone to women. Of the 10 million jobs created in Europe between 1995-2000, more than 40% were in health care, education and social work – all traditionally women’s occupations (European Commission, 2001a, 34). Women are the growth economy (European Commission, 2002,29). Not surprisingly therefore, capping the costs of labour in these traditionally pay-depressed or under valued areas is a major concern to European employers. 18

Yes Worldcom, Elan, Allied Irish Banks in America have gone into crisis, their apparent wealth creation an alleged fiction of accounting. Actual services delivered by real people took place, in health, education and social work. The growth of transacted services to individuals in the public and private sectors of these spheres is growing the European economy. It is also the dilemma of European Stability Pacts and Monetary Union, which appears to curb that growth, insofar as public sector expenditure and government debt are concerned. The labour force of women The Irish labour force has experienced a dramatic and unreported change in a European direction. This is the soaring and unusual entry of women into the labour force. Of every 100 women of an age to work, 47 are now at work or looking for work. This is called the participation rate or activity rate. It is above the EU average of 46 per cent. Ireland is not backward in women’s contribution to the economy. The economic independence of women is increasing as more and more have earned, are earning or will earn their own income. Of special interest are younger women. Of every 100 women aged 25 – 29 years, over 80 per cent are now at work or looking for work. For the nearest age group: age 30 – 34, around 70 per cent are in the labour force (FAS,2002). These are the core reproductive years when women form households and have children. So the highest rates of labour force participation are among women with young children. This is why there is a childcare crisis. These levels of participation of 70 and 80 per cent are possibly ceilings or maximum rates in an Irish context. No more incentives, incitement or encouragement to women to go out to work will have much effect in these younger age groups. If there is any room for growth in the increased participation of women in paid employment it is only among older women over the age of 45 years. Their recruitment into the labour force of paid employment will further reduce the volume of unpaid carers in and around the home. Ireland is unique in Europe in the form of its population growth. The population is increasing naturally from an excess of births over deaths, and from an excess of immigration over emigration. Half of the population increase is made up of natural increase and half from net migration. According to calculations of the CSO, approximately 46% of estimated immigration into Ireland from outside the European Union and the USA in 2002 was made up of women (CSO,2002).1 About 49% of estimated migration from Ireland is also made up of women. So the balance between the two is not disproportionate.

Table 1 Population and Migration ______________________________________ Year ending April 2001 April 2002 Natural increase 25,700 29,300 Net migration 26,300 28,800 Population change 52,000 58,000 ______________________________________ CSO (2002) Population and Migration Estimates April, Dublin, 5 September. 1

This estimate is both preliminary and to be used with caution.

What is of special note is the relentless rise of the labour force participation of women, notwithstanding the population increase from births. The entirety of the labour force increase in the last three months of 2002, just past was made up of women. Over the last year the labour force participation rates of women continued to rise, reaching 50.2% while men’s participation rates declined. So who are these women? We know that that they are a majority of employees, not self-employed or assisting relatives on farms. The highest labour force participation rates are among younger women aged 25 to 34 years. They appear to have peaked for younger women in May last year while (see Table 2) while those of older women continued to rise. This is perhaps Ireland’s childcare crisis glimpsed though national statistics. As older women – informal minders, mothers of older children and teenagers, enter the labour force or stay in their jobs, younger women are deprived of essential informal childcare and childcare backup. Table 2 -------------------------------------------------------------Labour force participation rates of women in selected age groups 2000-2002 % --------------------------------------------------------------Age group 25-34 45-54 -------------------------------------------------------------2000 76.6 51.9 2001 76.8 55.4 2002 75.7 56.8 CSO (2002) Quarterly National Household Survey 2002, Dublin, Table 8

The intergenerational contract

At European Union level, the view of the Commission is that demographic imbalances have led to some collapse of the contract between generations. This unwritten social contract is that parents-namely mothers - would look after their children and that children would take care of their older parents in time (Düvell, Jordan,2002,503). This intergenerational social contract is collapsing in Ireland. Yet we have not named it. In an implicit response to extensive feminist critique of his welfare models, Esping-Andersen makes some interesting observations on the comparative costs of childcare across Europe (Esping-Andersen, 2002,16). Childcare is an implicit tax penalty on average women’s employment and would consume one-third of mother’s net earnings in several countries studied. To reach a 60% employment rate for women, government expenditure on childcare ( or elder care) would have to increase significantly, such that the labour force participation rates of Irish women would escalate from 50% to reach 60% overall. Such care expenditure would increase the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement and might breach the guidelines for European Monetary Union and is unlikely to occur on this scale. Indeed some of the childcare demand forecasts already seem likely to overshoot their targets. The National Childcare Strategy (1999) forecast that the labour force participation rates of women would be 0.807 million in 8 years time in 2011. By Winter 2003, it had already reached 0.786 million – just 21, 000 short of the target (CSO, 2002a). This indicates a substantial underestimation of demand for childcare and the growth of labour force participation among women. 20

Some women find their own solution to the affordability-availability crisis by engaging non-national women as carers for their parents or their children. The migrant care worker The care crisis in terms of childcare is manifesting itself in the withdrawal of some younger women in the reproductive age groups from the labour market and workforce. For others, migrant women childcare workers and domestic workers are filling the vacated care space. Migrant domestic workers appear to be increasing in Ireland. Their numbers increased tenfold in the four years between 1999 and 2002. ‘There is a large socio-economic gap between parents who rely on childcare workers and the workers themselves. Nurseries and childminders are disproportionately used by parents with high levels of education working in full-time, higher status jobs. Nursery workers and childminders have low levels of education and work in low status jobs ( Cameron, Mooney, Moss, 2002, 577). This is a UK view. The childcare and elder care workforce is a research subject which has not yet been examined in Ireland in this way.

Table 3 Domestic work sector work permits 1999-2002 _________________________________ nos. issued/renewed 1999 80 2000 195 2001 521 2002 788 ------------------------------------------------Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment, (2003) Yearly Statistical Tables, Analysis of work permits by sector, Dublin. Viewing a Ukrainian website advertising Au Pair placement in Ireland two weeks ago, directed to potential migrant girls from the Ukraine was an interesting experience. It increases the impression of migrant workers filling a part of the childcare gap. An advertisement flyer from Limerick had this to say in 2002: “Are you tired of cooking, washing, ironing and looking after the kids ? Why not employ a live-in foreign maid and let her do all of the above for you. We can supply an experienced house maid or nanny from Asia.” In February 2003, a corporate child care chain applied for work permits for non-EU/non-EEA nationals to be authorised for employment in childcare daycare centres. The trend is confirmed in articles on the problems of foreign migrant childminders reaching national newpapers and media (Dempsey, 2003,14). By April 2003, the government had changed its mind and policy and determined that no new work permits would be issued for child care workers or nursery workers. This was in anticipation of the opening of the labour market to ten countries joining the European Union in 2004. Formerly ‘foreign’ nursery workers were soon to become labour market insiders – migrating across Europe to supply child and elder care to Northern Europe. 21

The changing composition of nursing personnel There were 1,689 overseas nursing applicants registered with an An Bord Altranais (Nursing Registration Board) in September 2001. All but 37 nurses were registered as general nurses. Some 1,310 overseas nurses of the 1,689 were from the Philippines (Department of Health and Children 2001). The levels of overseas recruitment have been stable between 1999 and 2001. The changing composition of the background and education of nursing professionals is part of the internationalisation or globalisation of health care personnel. The professional care skills of Philippine nurses and nursing home staff enable services to be provided which otherwise would not exist. There were about 0.8 million overseas contract workers outside the Philippines in 2000. The majority are not in Europe but in Saudi Arabia, Canada, or Gulf States. The ageing population of Japan may make it a new attractive destination for Philippine care workers who are also being targeted for care work in the Netherlands (ILO,1998). Why would this be occurring?

The answer may be both complex and common sense. The highest labour force participation rates are among younger women, in the same reproductive age groups where women experience first maternity and quickly complete their family with one, or two, three or four children. While recent Irish childcare strategy has privileged institutional care in the form of childcare centres, nurseries and other forms of collective group care, this may be a form that is neither matched, desired or affordable by those working women with two or three children (DJELR,1999, 58). After all - three children in day care costs about Euro 500 a week from after tax income. This is not exceptional. Childcare currently in the UK – within the Common Travel Area of Ireland and the UK is UK£128 (national average for nursery) per child or Euro 567 for 3 children (Day Care Trust, 2003). Affordability is replacing availability as a care issue. Informal care, or home based care, was found to be highly valued in the UK (Land, 2002,17). Yet the same care in nurseries or day care centres can be relatively lowly paid with poor career prospects. Elsewhere, the shortage of care workers in Health Board residential homes has led to the understaffing of children’s homes and even their temporary closure, while care workers are recruited from the UK. The ASTI teachers union will shortly vote again on payment for care work in secondary schools. Hospital beds are allegedly blocked by the insufficiency of beds in nursing homes, also experiencing a crisis in care workers. Are Irish women rejecting formal and informal care work? The staffing of care posts in nursing homes and private households by migrant workers from the Philippines fills the Irish gap and creates a void in the Philippines. The same migrant workers who come to Ireland, are in many cases themselves mothers of children who have to be minded for one or two years by other female relatives back home. Migrant workers here in Ireland are mothers too, whose childcare has to be paid for and arranged in another continent. This is the international care chain Work permit holders in Ireland have no legal right to be accompanied by their spouses, partners or children to Ireland. Working Visa holders have the right to ask to be accompanied by their spouse. They have no automatic entitlement to a positive response to such a request. They are not entitled to benefit from family reunification policies. Despite the significance of Article 44 of the Constitution in so many women’s rights battles, the protection of this Article does not extent to ‘guest workers.’ This transfers the charge of childcare back to the home countries cited in Table 4, and within some of the countries, back to other women and informal care arrangements. 22

Table 4 Work Permits issued by selected nationality 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------Country % of total Latvia 9.8 Lithuania 9.5 Philippines 8.0 Poland 7.8 Romania 6.1 South Africa 5.6 Ukraine 5.2 Other 48.0 ----------------------------------------------------------n=40,321 Extracted from Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment Statistical Tables, 2002. The collapse of formal care in Eastern Europe Since 1989, formal early childhood care and education has been crashing in Central and Eastern Europe. This is a price of enlargement. Discouraged from such investment by West European Governments, the shrinking social infrastructures for women and children have transferred ever greater amounts of parenting and care from the public authorities back to private households. As a consequence, migrant parent-workers from Central and Eastern Europe who come to Ireland as work permit holders must leave their children behind with their own extended families. This can be partly indicated from childcare data for those countries which figure high among the origins of work permit holders in Ireland. Nursery enrolment rates in Latvia fell from 9% o 5% of the age group between 1989 and 1997. In Lithuania nursery enrolment rates fell from 14 to 10 per cent for the same period. Kindergarten enrolments fell from 53 to 52 % in Latvia, from 64 to 42% in Lithuania and from 49 to 48% in Poland between 1989 and 1997. The value of family allowances (per child benefits) has fallen in Latvia and Romania over the nineties (Pascall and Manning, 2000, 253). Since 1989, the infrastructure of formal child care in Central and Eastern Europe has been eroded or collapsed. Enlargement of the European Union has involved a westernising of social infrastructure onto the lowest common denominator of European Union countries. Women worker-mothers from countries like Latvia, Lithuania and Romania who come to Ireland to undertake care work face their own care crisis at home. In occupying carework jobs in Ireland, the childcare crisis in Ireland is displaced further down the chain to labour supplying countries. Exclusion of domestic work from equality legislation Once in Ireland, migrant childcare or eldercare workers in domestic households do not benefit from nondiscrimination or equal treatment compared with Irish or European Union workers. An Irish or Swedish home-based childcare worker on a Dublin street or avenue can be paid more and have shorter working hours compared with a Latvian or Lithuanian worker in a different household on the same street or avenue. 23

Migrant work permit holders in private domestic households do not benefit from equal treatment under the Employment Equality Act, 1998. Once arrived in Ireland, they fall into the same exclusion zones, from which Irish women have been trying to escape for decades. The exclusion of household or domestic based workers from the scope of the Employment Equality Act, 1998 is no accident. Migrant domestic workers who believe they are being treated differently and in a discriminatory fashion compared with Irish domestic workers do not have the right to claim a race or ethnicity based ground of discrimination. This cannot be attributed to a negligence or forgotten void in the legislation. It is named in the Act as a specific exclusion. The Employment Equality Act, 1998, merely reproduced a long-standing pattern of prejudice towards household based employment. Section 37 (5) specifically identifies household-based employment as an exclusion of the Act. It states: ‘…nothing in this…applies to the employment of any person for the purposes of a private household’. This does not appear to have been a problem for the promoters or critics of the Act, during the 1996 to 1998 period of debate of the two Bills and Constitutional scrutiny which preceded the Act (Dail Eireann, 1998). Domestic workers or household-based workers are not workers under the scope of Ireland’s Employment Equality Act, 1998. This ideological position has a history. The 1952 Social Welfare Act, specifically excluded from insurance coverage women employed in private domestic service. This was based on the presumption that domestic work was not real work. Between 1940 and 1951, some 57% of women emigrating from Ireland gave their last occupation as ‘domestic servant.’ At that time (1951) there were 58,000 women domestic servants in Ireland. They were rendered legally invisible, their work rendered nought and their presence on this island treated as surplus to requirements (Conroy,1987). Putting the spotlight on the care chain In its second report on Forced Labour under the global reporting of the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work of the International Labour Organisation, domestic work figures among the global issues of concern. In a paragraph on ‘Putting the Spotlight on domestic work’ the Forced Labour Report suggests: ‘The ILO could enhance its own action on domestic work as well as encourage other institutions to do the same with the aim of getting a clearer picture of how forced or compulsory labour manifests itself in domestic work, and of ascertaining what the best options for tackling this problem in various national contexts for both children and adults might be’ (ILO,2002,105). It is time for Ireland to ratify the 1990 United Nations International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families as well as International Labour Organisation Conventions No. 97 of 1949 and No.143 of 1975, as suggested by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.(ICTU, 2003). Celebrating International Women’s Day 2003, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) issued a Press Release: It declared the exploitation of migrant women in Europe as an outrage. Migrant women are in the front-line in Europe often working in conditions outside the law in low paid or domestic work, said the ETUC (2003).

References Cameron, C. Mooney, A. Moss, P. (2002) ‘The Childcare Workforce –current conditions and future directions,’ Critical Social Policy, 22 (4) November, p.577. Conroy, P. (1987) The Position of women workers in overseas manufacturing plants in Ireland – a social policy study, Doctoral Thesis, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University College Dublin. CSO Central Statistics Office (2002) Population and Migration Estimates, Dublin, Derived from Table 8. CSO Central Statistics Office (2002a) Quarterly National Household Survey, Third Quarter, Dublin, Table 1. Dáil Éireann Parliamentary Debates (1998) vol 490, No.3, Wednesday 29 April, Houses of the Oireachtas, Dublin, columns 463-467 and 498-531. Dempsey, A. (2003) ‘How to find the perfect au pair…and avoid hiring the nanny from hell,’ Irish Independent, Independent Newspapers, Dublin, 12.03.03. Day Care Trust (2003) Press Release, 30.01.03, London. Department of Health and Children, Nursing Policy Division, Dublin, December 2001. DJELR –Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform (1999) National Childcare Strategy , Report of the Partnership 2000 Expert Working Group on Childcare, Government Publications, Dublin. Düvell, F. Jordan, B. (2002) ‘Immigration, Asylum and Welfare,’ Critical Social Policy,22 (3) August. Esping-Andersen, G. (2002) ‘The generational conflict reconsidered,’ Journal of European Social Policy, vol. 12 (1) February. European Commission (2001) Employment in Europe 2001, Office of Official Publications of the European Community, Luxembourg, English version, July. European Commission (2001a) Employment in Europe – Recent Trends and Prospects, Directorate General for Employment and Social Affairs, Office of Official Publications of the European Community, Luxembourg. ETUC European Trade Union Confederation, (2003) Press Release, Brussels, Belgium, 8.03.03. FAS –The Training Authority (2002) The Irish Labour Market Review, Dublin. ILO - International Labour Organisation (1998) Emigration Pressures and Structural Change: Case Study of the Philippines, ILO -Employment and Training Department, International Migration Papers 19,Geneva. ILO (2001) Stopping Forced Labour – Global Report under the Follow-up to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, International Labour Office, Geneva, p.105. ICTU Irish Congress of Trade Unions (2003) Global Solidarity: an ICTU Development Education Project –Campaigning for Workers Rights in the Global Economy, Resource Folder, Dublin and Belfast, Section 7. Land, H. (2002) Spheres of Care in the UK, Critical Social Policy, 22(1) February. Pascall, G. Manning, N. (2000) Gender and social policy: comparing welfare states in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Journal of European Social Policy, 10 (3) August.

Two-tier citizenship – the Lobe and Osayande case Ursula Fraser Refugee Officer, Amnesty International Irish Section

Introduction On 24th January 2002, the Irish Supreme Court handed down its judgment in the case involving the Lobe and Osayande families, the so-called “Irish born children case”.2 The case sought to resolve the right to remain of non-Irish parents, who had given birth to children in Ireland. This case undoubtedly re-ignited the asylum, immigration and, particularly, citizenship, debate in Ireland. Seven judges handed down individual judgments. Five judges ruled against the Lobe and Osayande families and two ruled in their favour. It is unusual for the Supreme Court to sit as seven and it reflects the seriousness with which the judiciary treated the issue. Drawing up an accurate statement of the law emanating from all seven judgments would be almost impossible. This paper, therefore, proposes to tease out some of the main issues that arose during the case and the commentary surrounding it. Summary of Lobe and Osayande case The Lobe (Czech) and Osayande (Nigerian) families sought asylum in the UK in the first half of 2001. They were unsuccessful and so they came to Ireland and lodged asylum applications here in March and May 2001 respectively in the hope of securing a more favourable result. Having discovered that prior applications for asylum had been made, the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner took steps to have the families transferred to the UK in order to complete the asylum process in that jurisdiction. The 1990 Dublin Convention governs this practice.3 However, before the authorities got an opportunity to put this decision into practice and execute the deportation orders, the wives of both families gave birth. Subsequently, the families claimed that they had accrued a right to remain in Ireland by virtue of the automatic Irish citizenship of their newly born children and the constitutional rights of the family in Irish law. Fajujonu case Central to both families’ arguments was the Fajujonu case of 1990.4 Mr Fajujonu, a Moroccan national, and his wife, came to live in Ireland in March 1981. They came to Ireland as illegal immigrants, and remained illegal, and were thus at all times at risk of being deported under the Aliens Act 1935,5 which was the legislation governing deportation at that time. Although available and anxious for work, Mr Fajujonu was not legally entitled to work. It was, in fact, a request for a work permit that finally brought him to the attention of the Department of Justice. 1

The views expressed are personal and do not reflect the views of Amnesty International Supreme Court decision concerning deportation of non-national parents of Irish children. L.(D.) & O.(A.) v. Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform (23 January 2003) See http://www.ucc.ie/law/irlii/newcases.htm 3 Convention determining the State responsible for examining applications for asylum lodged in one of the Member States of the European Communities: Official Journal C 254, 19.08.1997 4 [1990] 2 IR 151 5 Section 5 2

After eight years residence, Mr Fajujonu was finally given instructions by the Minister for Justice to make arrangements to leave the State. This led to the legendary Supreme Court case that established residence and work rights for the non-national parents of children born in Ireland. The crucial point in the Fajujonu case was that the parents had given birth to an Irish born child (three, in fact, but only one was the subject of court proceedings with her parents) and therefore the immediate family had the right to remain in Ireland. The Supreme Court in the Fajujonu case decided that a fresh look at the decision to deport was necessary because it appeared that the Minister for Justice did not adequately consider the constitutional rights of the family when deciding to request the father to leave the country. To facilitate this reappraisal, the Supreme Court laid down the criteria to be applied to such a Ministerial decision, i.e., that there would have to be grave, substantial, predominant and/or overwhelming reasons to justify a deportation order. This is a stringent test and one that successive Ministers for Justice have found difficult to meet. In reaching its conclusions, the Supreme Court held that, as an Irish citizen, the Fajujonu daughter was entitled to reside here. Also, as a citizen, she had the constitutional right to the company of her family. In the absence of compelling circumstances, the family could not be deported. The practical results of the Fajujonu case have been that non-national parents and siblings of Irish born children have been effectively “undeportable” from Ireland. The following passage of Walsh J. in the Fajujonu case highlights the fragile tension between the interests of the State and the immigrant: “In my view, [the Minister] would have to be satisfied, for stated reasons, that the interest of the common good of the people of Ireland and the protection of the State and its society are so predominant and so overwhelming in the circumstances of the case that an action which can have the effect of breaking up this family is not so disproportionate to the aim sought to be achieved as to be unsustainable.” In the Lobe and Osayande case, both the State and the appellant families relied on the Fajujonu case but for different reasons. Principal Arguments in the Lobe and Osayande case The main points that were raised in the Lobe and Osayande case revolved around the strong constitutional rights of the family and the extent to which the State has a power to limit such rights for the purposes of implementing its migration policy. Although the Supreme Court produced no easy formulas, a number of indicators were given as to how a balance between these opposing rights could be struck. (1) Constitutional Rights of the Family The central tenet of the arguments put forward on behalf of the Lobe and Osayande families was that there is no power to deport the family of an Irish citizen except in very restricted circumstances. Grave and substantial reasons would have to be adduced and it was argued the integrity of the asylum and immigration systems, including Ireland’s enforcement of the Dublin Convention, could not satisfy such a test. In considering such matters, they argued, the State failed to recognise the constitutional rights of the family members of an Irish child and/or the constitutional rights of an Irish citizen to the society of its family in Ireland.

The constitutional right to family unity formed a large part of the Supreme Court’s deliberations, although some judges emphasised family rights more than others. McGuinness J, for example, gave an expansive history of family law cases decided in Ireland and concluded that a State decision to disrupt family unity would have to have been borne of very compelling circumstances. She could not discern them in this case and so dissented from the majority view, which endorsed the Minister for Justice’s decision to proceed with deportation. However, it was generally agreed by both all judges that the Irish Constitution assigned to the family an exceptional role, unmatched in the bills of rights of many jurisdictions. Various excerpts from case law were drawn upon to confirm this. For example, the following passage from Keane CJ:6 “While the family, because it derives from the natural order and is not the creation of civil society, does not, either under the Constitution or positive law, take the form of a juristic entity, it is endowed with an authority which the Constitution recognises as being superior even to the authority of the State itself. While there may inevitably be tensions between laws enacted by the State for the common good of society as a whole and the unique status of the family within that society, the Constitution firmly outlaws any attempt by the State in its laws or its executive actions to usurp the exclusive and privileged role of the family in the social order.” Murphy J. in the same case stated:7 “… the influence of which on the Constitution has been so frequently recognised in the judgments and writings of Walsh J. - confers an autonomy on parents which is clearly reflected in these express terms of the Constitution which relegate the State to a subordinate and subsidiary role. The failure of the parental duty which would justify and compel intervention by the State must be exceptional indeed.” Walsh J in McGee v. Attorney General [1974] I.R. 284, at p. 310 stated: “The individual has natural and human rights over which the State has no authority; and the family, as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society, has rights as such which the State cannot control. However, at the same time it is true, as the Constitution acknowledges and claims, that the State is the guardian of the common good and that the individual, as a member of society, and the family, as a unit of society, have duties and obligations to consider and respect the common good of that society.” In the Lobe and Osayende case, because the constitutional right to family unity originated in extremely young children born here, there was considerable discussion about the wishes of the child. The parents asserted that if the child could make a decision it would opt to stay in Ireland with its family. Hardiman J pointed out that such a decision could not realistically lie with a young child and so it could not be anything but a parental pronouncement which is in turn constrained by the laws which apply to the parents. It is almost impossible not to engage in some fiction here. Clearly, a newborn baby or young child cannot make responsible decisions for their own welfare and a wish to remain in Ireland is one posited on them by the parents. Moreover, a child cannot delegate its legal decision making capacity where none exists. To bring this to its logical conclusion, any decision that a parent makes about its Irish child is based on legal, financial and physical limitations personal to them and the citizenship of the child has no practical bearing.

6 7

North Western Health Board v HW and CW [2001] 3 I.R. 622 Ibid. p. 732

The implication is that a citizen child would be expected to leave the State upon the parents’ deportation as the child would not be considered legally capable of contesting the State’s decision. But deportation may not be in the child’s best interests. Typical reasons could be that the political or economic climate in the family’s country of origin is unhealthy. On the first point, it would be open to such a family to claim asylum or re-activate an asylum application if it was previously withdrawn. Given the current low recognition rate, however, (approximately 9% of asylum applicants are granted refugee status) this might not be an attractive option. On the second point - economic problems on the country of origin - the solutions are no easier but the family could go back home and apply for a work visa or work permit to come back to Ireland for employment purposes. But all of these suggestions ignore a crucial point: what rights can non-nationals assert - based on the Irish citizenship of their children – when faced with a deportation order? Would a family really be expected to leave an Irish citizen child behind if it was considered to be in its best interests? If so, how would the State deal with such a case?8 States do not normally have the right to deport citizens. Extradition of citizens for serious non-political offences is the main exception. But the fact that other countries survive well with this internal consistency weighed heavily in the Supreme Court majority decisions. (2) Length of time in the State Taken at face value, the “Fajujonu rights” would seem capable of solving the problems faced by the Lobe and Osayande families. But Walsh J added a condition that before the immigrant parents gained a right of residence ". . . the family had to have made its home and residence in Ireland". Finlay CJ added to this by stipulating that the non-national must have “… resided for an appreciable time in the State”. The Fajujono family had been resident for eight years at the time of the Supreme Court case. In the Lobe and Osayande case, the State emphasised that a family needs to have been in Ireland for an appreciable period of time before “Fajujonu rights” can accrue. The Lobe and Osayande families arrived in Ireland in the first half of 2001 (they claimed asylum in March and May 2001 respectively), which meant that their stay - including the necessary suspension of deportation proceedings for their court case - amounted to less than two years. There was widespread opinion in the Supreme Court judgments in the Lobe and Osayande case that the length of time a family, including an Irish citizen child, has lived in Ireland should be taken into account. But it can only be one consideration of many. Fennelly J. agreed that length of time in the State could be a valid consideration but doubted that it was a compulsory legal concern. He referred to the Fajujonu case: “I cannot, however, discover any legal reasoning in the passage that would suggest that the constitutional rights of an Irish-born child depend on the length of time during which his parents have resided in the State. It seems to me, in fact, that there could not be such a principle. Firstly, it is rightly conceded that the child in each of the present cases is in fact a citizen. It follows that the child 8

The Supreme Court did not adequately address the question as to the fate of a child, if a non-national family faced with deportation was forced to leave their child behind because that would be in its best interests. If, for economic or political reasons, a parent felt that it would not be in the interests of their child to bring it back home the State would have to deal with the implications. Remarks that the child’s constitutional rights would be protected by the State by forcing its parents to take the Irish child wi th them do not take into account the social, economic and political realities of life in sub-Saharan Africa or former communist states of central and eastern Europe, for example. The vindication of Irish constitutional rights does have an extra-territorial dimension so it would seem contradictory to affirm on the one hand that the Irish citizen child is protected constitutionally but yet can be sent to a country where he or she is highly likely to suffer from financial, health and educational deprivations.

enjoys the constitutional rights, as a member of its family, which are guaranteed by the Constitution and described in the case law. Indeed, the younger a child is, in many respects, the more pressing and urgent is its need for the nurture and care of its parents, particularly its mother.” The Lobe and Osayande families acknowledged the limitations of the “Fajujonu rights” but maintained that the eight years of residence and economic status of the Fajujonu family (poverty was one of the reasons put forward for deporting them even though it was induced by refusal of a work permit), was merely an elaboration of the facts of the case, rather than the true basis of the decision. They argued that the years’ residence accrued were not crucial to the outcome of the case, which was determined solely by reference to the existence of the Irish born children, who served to “anchor” the entire family to the State. The State responded that this would imply that people in Ireland on holidays or short-term visas could then avail of rights of residence on the birth if a child here, a situation that would not, in its view, be acceptable. Under Article 8 of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, appreciable periods of residence is a required factor to be taken into account when adjudicating upon family rights in the context of deportation. Similarly, Section 3(6)(b) of the Immigration Act 1999 specifically requires that the Minister for Justice consider the duration of residence in the State of a proposed deportee before a deportation order is made. It therefore seems that consideration of the length of time that non-national parents have been in the State prior to their birth of their Irish child could be a justifiable consideration for the State when considering residency or deportation. (3) Immigration Control and the Common Good Both sides in the Lobe and Osayande case agreed that the Minister for Justice was not, nor is ever, absolutely precluded from deporting family members of an Irish born child. However, overwhelming reasons, such as criminal behaviour or threat to public order must be shown. No judge on the Supreme Court disagreed that the integrity of the asylum and immigration system are of the utmost importance. Nor did any underestimate the high esteem that is bestowed upon the family in Irish legal and social life. The question is, how does one preserve the inalienable constitutional rights of the Irish child, rooted in natural law, while simultaneously placing conditions on them, including forcible departure from the State? The elusive notion of the common good can sometimes take priority and in the Lobe and Osayande case, this appeared in the guise of the right for the State to control immigration. It is incumbent on the Executive and Legislature to formulate concrete law and policies that deal fairly, and lawfully, with the competing sets of rights. The Supreme Court’s role is to give guidance on this difficult balancing act. If one accepts that an Irish citizen child of a family is constitutionally entitled to the care and company of his or her family and that only a special and overwhelming reasons can override such a right, State incursions should only happen, therefore, in a restricted number of situations. Accepted examples are threats to public order and criminal convictions. The Minister for Justice did not claim that the presence of the Lobe and Osayande families would be adverse to the common good. But what concerned the State and the majority of the Supreme Court was that non-national parents of children born – through chance, arrangement or contrivance - who would not otherwise be entitled to remain here, would be able to do so as long as they were not convicted felons or terrorists. Fennelly J. acknowledged that a general characteristic of criminality pertaining to certain groups, the prevalence of infectious diseases, racial or communal tensions, strains on the resources of the State or high levels of unemployment on the State might justify general considerations to deport, but concluded that “the need to preserve the asylum and immigration system is an abstract, open-ended administrative reason that could not satisfy the test propounded in Fajujonu” 30

The State did not consider that reasons justifying a deportation would have to be personal to the nonnationals involved. Counsel for the Lobe and Osayande families submitted that the grave and substantial factors would need to be personal to the people involved and not obscure concepts such as routine immigration concerns. It was argued for the families that no general immigration policy concerns could justify the deportation of a member of the family of an Irish born child, no matter how defensible that policy may be, once “the immigration stork had landed”. More specifically, the State argued that it was legally obliged to enforce the Dublin Convention and it was therefore a necessary factor to take into account when considering a deportation order. However, if one looks at the rationale behind the Dublin Convention, transfer of asylum applicants out of Ireland to another country do not necessarily constitute an obligation. The 1990 Dublin Convention was a creation of European Union Member States, which allowed for the transfer of asylum applicants between one other. The idea behind it was to prevent multiple applications for asylum, to eradicate the ‘refugees in orbit’ phenomenon whereby no one state was taking responsibility for individual asylum claims and to share the burden of asylum seekers more equitably among Member States. The practical effects of the Convention were to arrange for a system of physical transfer of asylum applicants from one country to another based on a hierarchy of criteria which determine which Member State bears ultimate responsibility. In Ireland, the Convention is sometimes, but not always, invoked when an asylum seeker is discovered to have come from another EU Member State. It is within the terms of the Convention to examine an asylum claim in Ireland in spite of the technical fact that an applicant is transferable to another country. Indeed, given that there are so few non-EU direct flights to Dublin from refugeeproducing countries, if Ireland were to invoke the strict terms of the Convention for every asylum seeker who reaches Ireland, we would not be fulfilling our responsibility-sharing role – the philosophy underpinning the Convention. Therefore, it is difficult to argue that the State was breaching its asylum or immigration obligations by not applying the Dublin Convention. Two-tier citizenship Since the foundation of the State, there has always been a clear legal basis for Irish citizenship. Article 3 of the Irish Free State Constitution provided citizenship to those resident in the State on the date the Constitution came into force, 6th December 1922, once they (or one of their parents) was born here or they had resided within the Irish Free State for not less than seven years previously. In 1935, the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act was passed, which provided for citizenship by birth or descent. Article 9 of the 1937 Constitution offered a continuity of citizenship for anyone “who is a citizen of Saorstát Eireann immediately before the coming into operation of this Constitution”. The most recent statutory basis for citizenship is found in the 1956 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act, as amended. Section 6(1) states that “Every person born in Ireland is an Irish citizen from birth”. Finally, Article 2 of the Constitution, as amended by the Good Friday Agreement, reaffirms the birthright of every person born on the island of Ireland to be part of the Irish nation, which includes citizenship unless they are otherwise precluded by law. Citizenship is only an option and not an inherent characteristic and so, if born here, one is not automatically obliged by Article 9 to “observe fidelity to the Nation and loyalty to the State”. Another form of citizenship is derived from the jus sanguinis principle whereby a simple blood relationship can render one eligible for an Irish passport. An example is a child born in Australia to Irish parents, or whose grandparents are Irish. Such a child could claim Irish citizenship. However, according to the Supreme Court ruling in the Lobe and Osayande case, if one is born in Dublin - but of non-EU parentage - the parents are not entitled to citizenship nor automatic residence rights, in spite of the blood relationship. In other words, the type of citizenship deriving from birth in Ireland is 31

a stand-alone right without any real benefits to the citizen until he or she reaches an age where he or she is capable of making a decision to return to Ireland, if desired. It is not a very valuable right, therefore, and is worth contrasting with the rights of EU citizens who live in Ireland under free movement laws. They are entitled to bring their family here, including parents and grandparents but the Irish citizens born here to non-nationals cannot do so. The principle of automatically offering citizenship to anyone born on the soil of a country is known as jus soli. Similar to the Irish situation, the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution provides that all persons born in the US are entitled to US citizenship. US case law, however, has developed to ensure that there are no automatic rights of residence for the parents of children born on US territory. Indeed, counsel for the Lobe and Osayande families could not cite one jurisdiction in which such rights are afforded and this significantly weakened their argument. Instead, counsel argue that family rights under Article 41 of the Irish constitution are unique in their strength on the familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s position in Irish society. The State relied on some US case law to support its arguments in Lobe and Osayande. The court in Gonzalez-Cuevas v. Immigration and Naturalisation Service9 held that families that were comprised of non-national parents and US child citizens could be deported. To allow illegal residents to become automatically legal due to the fortuitous or contrived birth of a child on US soil, the court held, would run contrary to the intention of the law and give an unfair advantage to those who did not comply with normal immigration criteria. Subsequent US decisions have held that where deportable non-US citizens have children born in the US, the constitutional rights of such children are not violated if the family is deported. The justification given is that the childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s return to the US to exercise their right to reside as a citizen is merely postponed and not barred. Fennelly J. was not convinced by the postponed enjoyment of citizenship rights argument. He maintained that the deportation of a child in its early months automatically deprives the child of the possibility of being nurtured and educated in its country of citizenship. The most honest reading of the US jurisprudence is that if the non-national parents of a US citizen child are deported the child suffers the consequences and his or her citizenship is largely irrelevant. It is difficult to explain this two-tiered citizenship whereby citizens of non-Irish parents have less rights than those belonging to Irish parentage. One must pay for the legal status of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s parents it seems and although one might be justified in concluding that there is an element of racism, discrimination or careful selection involved, there is a bigger picture which has led to this anomaly in Ireland. Political and Social Background to the Lobe and Osayande Case The number of applications for asylum in Ireland has increased significantly in the last few years. The total number of applications rose from 424 in 1995 to 11,634 in 2002. These statistics, coupled with the number of asylum application withdrawals due to Irish born children had a significant impact on the majority Supreme Court decision. It was explained by the State that the main reasons for withdrawals of asylum applications are marriage to an EU national, voluntary repatriation or birth of an Irish child. Up to November 2001, the Department of Justice received 5,247 applications for permission to remain in the country on the basis of parentage of an Irish citizen, from current or former asylum applicants. 10 The majority of the Supreme Court acknowledged that these statistics were stark enough to warrant some sort of policy re-think on the part of the State.

9 10

515 F. 2d 1222 (5th Cir. 1975) US Court of Appeal for the Fifth Circuit Written response of the Minister for Justice to question 343, 11th December 2001

Hardiman J, having noted the increase in figures for asylum applications, observed that “When these figures are correlated with the overall numbers of applications for asylum, and with the rate of withdrawals of such applications, the significance of the right alleged to attach to parentage of an anchor child in the context of the asylum system generally becomes clear.” Extrapolating from the figures, he noted that of the 6,570 anchor child applications in 2001, 5,924 were from current or former asylum applicants. Even though an exact figure was unavailable to him, he was satisfied that the approval rates for residency were higher that the success rate for asylum applications, which is currently a minimal 9% of overall applications. Hardiman J. emphasised that his observations were not essential to the outcome of the case but, clearly, they influenced his thinking. He was specifically concerned that if the Minister for Justice was not allowed to deport a family in the circumstances such as presented in the Lobe and Osayande case, then the mere fortuity of a birth in Ireland would override the ordinary asylum procedure, whether the claim for asylum was founded or not. Apart from being internationally anomalous, he claimed, it would be “frankly risible in the eyes of informed observers”. The comments of Hardiman J. are honest at least. The State has been claiming for many years that there is wide-scale abuse of the asylum system and professes an inability to control the numbers of asylum seekers arriving. The so-called legal loophole created by conferral of residency rights based in an Irish born child was considered to be a serious form of abuse. The Department of Justice has publicly denounced such abuse even though it was not affirmatively proved (and arguably cannot be) and the Government has, for many years, sought legal methods of curbing it. Due to the intractable Fajujonu judgment this has proved highly difficult. It is hard not to conclude that the State selected its case carefully when choosing to deport the Lobe and Osayande families. They would normally have been entitled to “Fajujonu rights” of residence but they were also Dublin Convention cases. This means that they would have been sent to the UK and not have been deported to a country run by a despot or deprived economically. Whether the families knew that giving birth in Ireland would probably secure them residency rights is a matter of speculation. At this time also, heads of maternity hospitals were panicking about the pressures due to the inordinate rise in non-national births. In sum, public and official opinion would not have been operating in favour of these particular families. Practical Effects of the Judgment Very swiftly after the Supreme Court judgments were handed down, the Minister for Justice announced that there would be no mass deportations. Indeed, the judgments do not allow such an outcome. Over 10,000 people will be affected by the case and each will have to be decided on its individual merit. Otherwise the obligation to engage in the rights-balancing exercise will not be fulfilled. The Minister for Justice also stated that cases would be decided on a case by case basis and that the Department of Justice would not be unreasonable or inflexible. Arguably, the constraints of natural and constitutional justice would not allow for any other result, even before the Supreme Court ruled in Lobe and Osayande. The Minister for Justice also stated that he did not have any intention to amend the citizenship provisions of the Constitution a possibility being toyed with for a number of years. With the newly found freedom to deport the non-national parents of citizens, the unattractive path of constitutional referendum will not be necessary. This will be a relief for many in official circles, especially in light of the fact that citizenship based on birth on the island of Ireland was solidified with the Good Friday Agreement. 33

The Government’s policy on how to handle the existing residency applications based on Irish born children has yet to emerge and it is engaging in public consultation on the implications of the Supreme Court judgment. Conclusion A number of judges on the Supreme Court emphasised the importance of the separation of powers between the executive, the judiciary and the legislature and, in particular, noted the limitations with which the Supreme Court must work when pronouncing on major policy issues such as asylum, immigration and citizenship. Keane CJ, in Lobe and Osayande, put it thus: “the resolution of the complex political, social and economic issues surrounding immigration, which are not unique to Ireland, are entirely a matter for the Oireachtas and Executive”. Whatever one’s view of the Supreme Court judgments, and there will be many, it is submitted that judicial activism may not be the most appropriate way of dealing with major policy issues such as immigration. A major problem is that court proceedings are necessarily confined to the facts of a particular case. Although judges will invariably expand upon legal principle and hypothetical factual scenarios to illustrate some crucial points, they are not necessarily considered the ratio, or critical essence, of a judgment and can be subsequently disregarded. Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s main official concern is that the policy choices of the arms of government are rational, legal and just. Undoubtedly the issues facing the Court were complex and the density of their judgments reflected this. But if policy formulation is to be left ultimately to the Oireachtas and the Legislature, what is the exact value of the excellent but conflicting judgments of the seven Supreme Court judgments? Is the Supreme Court really so far out of the loop or is it silently underwriting State policy on immigration?

Development in anti-trafficking law and policy: their impact on the survivors of trafficking in women. Catherine Kenny

Every year according to the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, up to 4 million people are trafficked to work in slavery like conditions as bonded labourers, sex workers, domestic workers and beggars. 1 Anti-slavery International’s estimate of 700,000 men, women and children affected by trafficking2 is more conservative. Given its illegal nature, and the risks the victims are subjected to by international criminal gangs involved in trafficking, it is impossible to give an accurate estimate of the numbers involved. However, most organisations working in this area acknowledge that trafficking in persons is on the increase in many parts of the world. Trafficking in persons is a profitable business3 with only minimal risks involved, as it is a minor crime in most countries where convictions for drugs or arms trafficking can attract lengthy prison sentences. The traditional flow of trafficked persons from what are termed developing countries to western destinations countries is continuing, but there has also been a substantial increase in the number of persons trafficked from Central and Eastern Europe. In countries such as the Ukraine, the economic crisis combined with the lifting of decades old travel restrictions after the fall of Communism has made many people in particularly women (who account for 90% of the newly unemployed in the Ukraine) vulnerable to traffickers. 4 Many trafficked women have suffered egregious violations of their human rights, such as rape, torture, starvation, forced drug use, forced pregnancy, forced marriage and forced abortion. Trafficking in persons has been recognised by the UN as a contemporary form of slavery.5 Historically, trafficking has been defined in terms of the movement of women and children across borders for prostitution. While trafficking has a disproportionate impact on women and girls and frequently involves trafficking for commercial sex purposes, trafficking also has other purposes such as for sweatshop, domestic or agricultural labour, begging and forced or fictitious mail order marriages. 6 Causes of trafficking The reasons for the increase in trafficking are many. The most significant of these are (1) the globalisation of the world economy, which has meant not only an increase in the movement of money and goods across borders but also the movement of people, legally and illegally from poorer to richer countries. In recent years, we have seen the increasing feminisation of migration generally. In some States, governments and law enforcement agencies ignore the problem of trafficking and may even 1

Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking: Fact Sheet on Trafficking in Women and Children. http://www.trafficked-women.org/fact.html. 2 www.antislavery.org 3 Europol, the European Police liaison agency has identified human trafficking as the second largest criminal activity in Europe after drug trafficking. Irish Times 18 September 2000. 4 International Organisation for Migration (IOM) Press Release. US-EU Transnational Seminar in L’viv to conclude information campaign against Trafficking in Women. 9 – 10 July 1998 5 The UN Sub Committee on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has stated that: ‘The trafficking in persons today can be viewed as the modern day equivalent to the slave trade of the last century’. UN ECOSOC Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights: Contemporary Forms of Slavery: Updated review of the Implementation of and follow up to the conventions on Slavery. E/CN.4/Sub.2/2000/3/Add.1, 26 May 2000, para 25 6 Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) – Office for Domestic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR): Trafficking in Human Beings, The Implications for the OSCE, p2.

collude with traffickers; (2) the inadequacy of laws prohibiting trafficking, both international instruments and domestic law in most countries of origin, transit and destination; (3) the subordinate position of women in many societies, which is reflected in lack of opportunities in the fields of education and employment; (4) the economic hardship caused by the transition to the market economy in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and (5) the high demand for trafficked persons to work in sweatshops and as domestic and sex workers has meant high profits with low risk for traffickers. 7 This paper will examine the developments in international law addressing trafficking in persons in particular on the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in persons, especially Woman and Children and will argue that this Protocol, although significant in particular in that it provides a definition of trafficking and provides for strong enforcement measures against traffickers may not be any more successful than previous Conventions in actually combatting trafficking. It will go on to consider other relevant international instruments and agreements in particular CEDAW and the Beijing Platform for Action. Finally, the lack of legislation and policy on this issue in Ireland will be addressed. While recent legislation (the Illegal Immigrants (Trafficking) Act 2000, appears to address the problem, it will be seen that the prevention of illegal immigration rather than protection for the victims of trafficking was the objective. In conclusion, some provisions to protect the human rights of trafficked persons, which should be included in any future Irish legislation will be suggested. International anti-trafficking instruments The historical understanding of trafficking in international law had been the movement across State borders for the purposes of prostitution and this understanding was reflected in international instruments throughout the twentieth century. International concerns about trafficking in women dates from the late 19th Century when attention was focused on the problem of ‘white slave traffic’, the expropriation of European women to brothels particularly in the colonial empires. As a result the International Agreement for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic was introduced in 1904.8 As the title suggests, only white women were protected under the Agreement. 9 The 1904 Agreement only required States Parties to collect information with regard to the procurement of women abroad and as it included no provision dealing with the punishment of those involved in the procurement of women, it proved to be ineffective.10 The 1910 International Convention for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic stipulated that States Parties must punish persons ‘who hired, abducted or enticed for immoral purpose any women under the age of 21 or used violence, threats, fraud or any compulsion on a woman over the age of 21 to accomplish the same purpose, even if he or she committed the acts constituting the offence in different countries. 11 After the First World War, the problem of trafficking in women and children and children was of such concern that Article 23 para 1(c) of the League of Nations Covenant entrusted the League ‘with the general supervision over execution of agreements with regard to the traffic in women and children and the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs’.12 The 1921 International Convention for the 7

Miko, Francis T., Trafficking in Women and Children: the US and International Response. Congressional Research Service Report 98-649C 8 International Agreement for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic, May 18 1904, 35 Stat 1979, 1 LNTS 83. 9 Farrior, Stephanie. ‘The International Law on Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution: Making it live up to its Potential’. 10 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 213, p216 10 Dunbar, Michelle O.P. ‘The Past, Present and Future of International Trafficking in Women for Prostitution’. 8 Buff. Women’s L.J. 103 1999/2000. p109; Chuang, Janie. ‘Redirecting the Debate over Trafficking in women, Definitions, Paradigms and Contexts’. 11 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 65, Spring 1998 11 International Convention for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic, May 4 1910, 211 C.T.S., 45 Article 12 Quoted in Farrior, op cit pp.216,217

Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children13 extended the (limited) protection provided in earlier Conventions to non-white women and children of either sex. 14 A further Convention was adopted in 1933, which ‘extended the scope of punishable acts that had previously been criminalized only with regard to minors, to women of full age’.15 These early Conventions considered the end purpose of trafficking to be a matter of domestic jurisdiction for the States Parties and therefore only addressed the process of recruitment and transportation.16 Therefore, activities such as operating a brothel were not criminalized. In 1949, the aforementioned treaties were consolidated into the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. 17 The 1949 Convention18states in its Preamble that ‘…prostitution and the accompanying evil of the traffic in persons for the purpose of prostitution are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person and endanger the welfare of the individual, the family and the community…’ and States ratifying the Convention are obliged to punish these persons who to ‘…gratify the passions of another (1) Procures, entices or leads away, fur purposes of prostitution another person, even with the consent of that person, (2) exploits the prostitution of another person even with the consent of that person.’ This provision is significant in that the deception that can often accompany forced prostitution is clearly prohibited.19 Furthermore, States agree to punish owners, managers and persons involved in the financing of a brothel as well as those renting a facility for the purpose of prostitution.20 They also agree to participate in particular in enforcement measures, which include co-operation in the extradition of traffickers21co-ordination of investigation efforts, 22 and sharing information.23 The 1949 Convention also provides that victims of trafficking are to be repatriated if they wish or if ‘their expulsion is ordered in conformity with law’.24 Commentators are generally of the view that the Convention has not been successful in preventing trafficking. The majority of States, including Ireland have not ratified it. 25 Several reasons have been put forward to explain its ineffectiveness:(i) Weak enforcement mechanisms: The Convention requires States parties to report annually to the UN Secretary-General laws, regulations and other measures that they have taken to give effect to the Convention. The secretary-General shall publish this information periodically and it shall be sent to the UN Member States and non-Member States that have been invited to ratify the Convention.26 However, no supervisory body was established by the Convention with the power to examine the reports of the States parties and to issue recommendations to the States based on these reports. In 1974, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) decided that States Parties to the Convention should submit on a regular basis reports on 13

International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, Sept 20 1921, 9 L.T.N.S. 415 14 Chuang, op cit, p75 15 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women of Full Age, Oct 11 1933. 150 L.T.N.S.431 16 Chuang, op cit p75 17 Dunbar, op cit p110 18 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, opened for signature march 21, 1950, 96 U.N.T.S. 271, entered into force July 25, 1951 19 Talleyrand, Isabelle. ‘Military Prostitution: How the authorities worldwide aid and abet international trafficking in Women’. 27 Syracuse J Int’l L and Dom. 151, Winter 2000, p164 20 Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others 21 Articles 8 and 9 22 Article 13 23 Article 14 24 Article 14(2) 25 As Prof Bassiouni argues: ‘…a telling sign is that only 25% of the world’s countries have ratified the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others.’ International Human Rights Institute Website. See also Farrior, op cit, p217 26 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, Article 21

the situation in their countries with regard to trafficking and slavery to the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. These reports are considered by the Sub-Commission’s Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery. However, the Working group may not take any action based on the reports. 27 In addition, there is are no provisions for victims of trafficking who wish to petition the Working Group to do so. (ii) The Convention does not provide any definition of trafficking. It prohibits the procurement, enticement or leading away of a person but only for the purposes of prostitution with or without the consent of that person. It is generally accepted that men as well as women are trafficked and women are trafficked for a variety of purposes including domestic work, illegal and/or bonded labour, false adoptions, the removal or organs, sex tourism and begging. 28 Persons trafficked for purposes other than prostitution are not protected under the Convention. Other international instruments relevant to trafficking Several other international instruments may provide protection to the victims of trafficking: The Slavery Convention of 192629 and the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices similar to Slavery.30 The 1926 Convention defined slavery as ‘the status or conditions of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.’31 In many cases, trafficked women are held in slavery-like conditions. Under the Convention, States Parties would ‘undertake to adopt the necessary measures in order that severe penalties may be imposed in respect of.’ violations of its provisions. In 1956, a Convention to supplement the earlier Convention and bring it into the UN system was adopted. States Parties were required to penalise individuals who engage in, inter alia, selling women, turning children over for exploitation and debt bondage schemes. 32 Unfortunately, again enforcement measures are weak,33 and as was the case with the Conventions specifically addressing trafficking, they have generally been unsuccessful. International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions. Two of the ILO Conventions are also relevant to trafficking, in particular for the purposes of forced labour. The Forced Labour Convention (No29) adopted in 193034 and the 1957 Abolition of Forced Labour Convention (105).35 Both conventions have defined ‘forced labour’ as ‘all work or service, which is executed from any person under the mandate of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.’ This definition would certainly apply to many persons who have been trafficked. States Parties must submit reports to the ILO regarding measures the have taken under any ILO Convention they have ratified. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)

Farrior, op cit, p220 Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking; What is trafficking? Available at http://www.traffickedwomen.org/whatis.html 29 Slavery Convention of 1926, Sept 25 1926. Stat. 2183, T.S. No 778, 60 L.N.T.S. 253 30 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, entered into force April 30, 1957, 266 U.N.T.S. 40 31 Slavery Convention of 1926, Article 1. 32 1956 Supplementary Convention Articles 1(C) and (D)) 33 Farrior, op cit, p222 34 Forced Labour Convention, ILO Convention 29, June 28 1930, 39 U.N.T.S 55 35 Abolition of Forced Labour Convention (No 105), June 25 1957, 320 U.N.T.S. 291 28

CEDAW, which entered into force in September 1981, prohibits all forms of Discrimination against women and addresses some of the issues that relate to the sexual exploitation of women.36 Article 6 of CEDAW provides that ‘States Parties shall take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to suppress all forms of traffic in women and exploitation of prostitution of women.’ The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women was established under the Convention in 1982 to consider periodic reports on its implementation by the States Parties. An Optional Protocol to CEDAW on the Right to Petition was adopted in 1999. This gives individuals and groups of women the right to complain to the Committee regarding violations of their rights under the Convention. Furthermore, the Committee will be able to conduct investigations on the abuse of women’s human rights. However, while the Protocol means that trafficked women now have a mechanism for complaining about human rights violations they have suffered and having those abuses investigated by the Committee, this only applies in the case of States who are party to the Protocol. Ireland is due to submit its periodic report to the CEDAW Committee, however, it is unlikely the report will actually be examined until next year at the earliest due to the backlog which has built up as the Committee meets only twice annually. It would, no doubt be over optimistic to hope that Ireland has fulfilled its obligations under Article 6 by then. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action calls for the elimination of trafficking and recommends that States should provide assistance to the victims. Women who have been trafficked experience violations of their human rights as guaranteed by international instruments that Ireland has ratified including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Rights violated through the trafficking process can include: The right to life (Article 2 ECHR, Article 6 ICCPR); the right not to be subject to inhuman, degrading or cruel punishment (Article 3 ECHR, Article 7 ICCPR), the right not to be held in slavery or servitude or to be forced to perform compulsory labour (Article 4 ECHR, Article 8 ICCPR), the right to liberty and security of the person (Article 5 ECHR, Article 9(i) ICCPR), the right to consensual marriage and the right to equality in marriage and divorce (Article23.3 ICCPR, Article 10.1 ICESCR) and the right to work and just, safe and fair working conditions (Articles 6 and 7 ICESCR). PROTOCOL TO PREVENT, SUPPRESS AND PUNISH TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS, ESPECIALLY WOMEN AND CHILDREN Background to the Convention against Transnational Crime and the Supplementary Protocol on Trafficking in Persons. The United Nations General Assembly in its resolution 53/111 of December 1998 established an intergovernmental ad hoc committee for the purpose of elaborating an International Convention against Transnational Crime.37 The Committee was also given the task of elaborating three additional Protocols: Protocol against Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air; Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children and the Protocol on Illicit Manufacturing and Trafficking in Firearms. The Committee held 11 sessions in Vienna from January 1999 to October 2000. Over 120 countries as well as international NGOs attended various meetings to draw up a draft text. The Ad HOC Committee finalised the text of the Convention and two Supplementary Protocols in October. In its Resolution of 15 November 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention and its 36

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Dec 18, 1979, 1249 U.N.T.S. 14 37 UN Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. Contemporary Forms of Slavery. Updated review of the implementation of and follow up to the Convention on Slavery. E/CN.4/Sub 2/2000/3/Add.1, 26May 2000, para 36.

Protocols. A High Level Signing Conference for the Convention in Palermo took place in Palermo in December 2000 at which 121 of the 148 States present signed the Convention and 80 signed the trafficking Protocol. 38 Ireland signed the Convention and the two Protocols, but have not ratified any of them. The Trafficking Protocol is the first comprehensive international anti-trafficking agreement. Five factors in particular have contributed to the development of the protocol. (1) Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) worldwide lobby governments on behalf of victims of trafficking who suffered serious violations of their human rights. These NGOs also made governments aware of the methods used by traffickers. (2) It is anticipated that as the number of migrants continues to increase, the number of persons trafficked will increased accordingly. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimates that 150 million persons currently migrate each year for reasons, which include escaping poverty, armed conflict and political instability. The US State Department estimates that approximately 2 million of these migrants are trafficked. (3) States are increasingly concerned about the fact that trafficking is the third most profitable illegal industry behind drugs and arms. The IOM estimate that profits from trafficking in persons is in the region of US $7 billion. (4) Few States have enacted anti-trafficking law ant therefore, have not effective means of dealing with trafficking and (5) existing international anti-trafficking law such and the Convention on the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others and the anti-trafficking provisions in CEDAW have proved to be inadequate, primarily because the term 'trafficking' remained undefined and their scope was limited to enticing or abducting women for prostitution abroad.39 Moreover, States' anti-trafficking laws often address what could more accurately be described as smuggling in migrants. 40 Smuggling in migrants is defined in the Protocol against Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Crime as 'the procurement, in order to obtain directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit of the illegal entry of a person into a State Party of which the person is not a national or permanent resident'. Smuggling rather than trafficking is what is addressed in the Illegal Immigrants (Trafficking ) Act. Article 2 of the Protocol states that the purposes of the Protocol are '(a) to prevent and combat trafficking in persons, paying particular attention to women and children; (b) to prevent and assist the victims of such trafficking with full respect for their human rights and (c) to promote co-operation among States Parties, in order to meet these objectives.' One of the most significant elements of the Protocol is that it includes a definition of trafficking in persons. Trafficking in persons is 'the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or for the giving or receiving or payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person for the purposes of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum for the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs'. The importance of this definition is, that it removes the association of trafficking solely with prostitution, when many women are trafficked for other purposes including other forms of sexual exploitation. Article 3 further states that the consent of the victim will be irrelevant where any of the means set out in sub-paragraph (a) have been used. Even if the means described have not been used, the recruitment 38

The Conventions and Protocols require 40 ratifications before they come into force Hyland, Kelly E. 'The Impact of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children' 8 Hum. Rts. Br. 30 Winter 2001, pp30,31 40 Muireann O'Briain, while Director of ECPAT in a paper given at the World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation if Children noted that in industrial countries, the issue of traffic is addressed in the context of immigration. The International legal framework and current national legislative and enforcement purposes. Available at http://193.135.165.19/webpub/csechome/2156.htm 39

transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the purposes of exploitation shall be considered traffic in persons. Article 5 stipulates that States Parties must criminalise trafficking in persons as described in Article 3. Furthermore, Article 10 requires co-operation between law enforcement and immigration authorities in States Parties to enable them to identify whether individuals crossing international borders with inadequate documentation are perpetrators or victims of trafficking in persons, the types of travel documentations that have been used for the purposes of trafficking in persons and the means used by organised criminal groups for the purposes of trafficking in persons. Articles 11 and 12 require States parties to strengthen border control measures, such as checking travel documents, boarding vehicles for inspection and improving the quality of travel documents in order to reduce fraud. Articles 6,7 and 8 deal with the protection of the victims of trafficking in persons. Article 6 obliges States Parties to protect the privacy and identity of victims of trafficking in persons by, inter alia, making any legal proceedings relating to trafficking confidential. Measures shall also be adopted to ensure that victims are informed in appropriate cases with regard to relevant court proceedings and assistance to enable their views to be presented at appropriate states of the criminal proceedings. There are no special provisions for victims who are witnesses, such as permitting the presentation of evidence by electronic or other special means. Article 6 also provides that States parties shall consider implementing to provide for the physical, psychological and social recovery of victims of trafficking, but in particular of appropriate housing, medical assistance, counselling and information regarding their legal rights and employment and educational opportunities. States Parties may take measures pursuant to Article 7 to permit victims of trafficking in persons to remain in their territory either temporarily or permanently. Article 8 provides for the repatriation of victims of trafficking in persons, and requires States Parties to facilitate the repatriation of citizens and persons with the right of permanent residence by providing the necessary travel documentation and a return without delay. Article 9 addresses prevention measures and requires States Parties to establish policies programmes and other measures to prevent and combat trafficking in persons and to protect victims of trafficking in persons from re-victimisation. States are also encourages to undertake mass media information campaigns, close co-operation with NGOs and the creation of social and economic incentives. It is anticipated that these measures will help alleviate the conditions that make persons vulnerable to traffickers. Weaknesses of the Protocol While the Protocol has undoubted strengths, including a definition of trafficking in persons, enforcement measures and provisions aimed at assisting victims, it contains several shortcomings which will prevent it from being an effective tool to combat the trafficking in persons and may be used by States as a mechanism to prevent illegal migration rather than to protect the human rights of trafficked persons. The most obvious of these shortcomings must be the lack of clear protections afforded the victims of trafficking. Despite the commitment in the Protocol to assisting and protecting the victims of trafficking, the provisions for implementation are weak. Firstly the language in relevant articles is weak. An example of this is Article 7, which provides that States Parties 'shall consider' adopting measures to permit victims to remain in their territory, it does not require States Parties to adopt measures. Article 6 specifies that victims require medical care, hosing, counselling, job training, legal assistance and physical safety for their 'physical and psychological recovery'. However, States Parties are only required to 'consider implementing' such measures. The Preamble stresses the importance of a comprehensive international approach to, inter alia, the punishment of traffickers and the internationally recognised human rights of victims. If the rights of 41

trafficked persons are not protected and their needs adequately addressed, victims will not risk further exposure to harm from traffickers giving evidence in proceedings. Assistance to trafficked persons is discretionary , so victims that remain in a country to give evidence in proceedings against the trafficker could be held in detention with no services provided. The other main weakness of the Protocol is its provision with regard to residence in the host country for trafficked persons. In many cases trafficked persons need a safe refuge, in which to recover from their experiences and due to the risk of further harm to the victims themselves or their family, may be unable to return to their country of origin or give evidence against their traffickers. In some cases, their families and communities reject them or in some cases, the family of persons in their community may be complicit in the trafficking. Therefore, the provision that states shall consider taking measures or permit trafficked persons to remain on their territories on a temporary basis where appropriate, is clearly inadequate. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human rights had urged Member States to consider a provision whereby trafficked persons are granted at a minimum, the option of temporary residence.41 Some States have recognised as refugees, women who have been trafficked. In the UK, the Special Adjudicator found that a Ukrainian women who had been trafficked for the purposes of prostitution was a member of a particular social group ‘ women trafficked from the Ukraine to other countries for sexual exploitation and detained under threat of violence’.42 In Ireland, the Refugee Act provides that the social group category includes persons fearing persecution on account of their gender. In addition, ‘persecution’ includes harm of a sexual nature. It is clear, therefore that women, facing persecution in their home state as a result of trafficking should be recognised as refugees

Anti-trafficking legislation and policy in Ireland The Illegal Immigrants( Trafficking) Act 2000, could more accurately be called the Illegal Immigrants (Smuggling) Act, as its main objective is to criminalise the activity of smuggling or facilitating the illegal entry of persons to this country. The legislation was enacted in response to the significant increase in the number of asylum seekers arriving in Ireland.43 In Section 2(1), the Act penalises 'a person who organises or knowingly facilitates the entry into the State of a person whom he or she knows or has reasonable cause to believe to be an illegal immigrant or person who intends to seek asylum…' The Act makes no reference to persons who are brought into Ireland for the purposes of exploitation, which is the key difference between trafficking and smuggling. The Act permits the forfeiture or ships, aircraft or other vehicles, which were used to bring illegal immigrants into the State. The Act fails to address the rights of trafficked persons, which means that they are liable to be treated in the same manner as other illegal immigrants and may be subject to detention and deportation. This is the only piece of legislation addressing the issue of trafficking of women in Ireland, although, of course criminal law particularly in relation to crimes such as assault and rape can be used to prosecute traffickers for trafficking-related crimes. Conclusion The problem of trafficking in persons will not be successfully addressed by the penalising of traffickers alone. While, undoubtedly trafficking in persons is an organised transnational crime and 41

UNGA Informal note. SSHD v. Dzhygun IAT [00/TH/00728] 17 May 2000. 43 In 1992, there were 39 applications for refugee status in Ireland. This has increased to 11,634 applications in 2002. 42

an immigration issue, it is not only that. In order to prevent trafficking in persons, it must be seen, ‘first and foremost as a violation of individual human rights and only secondarily as a violation of State’s interests’.44 In most states, anti-trafficking legislation, policies and initiatives have focused overwhelmingly on controlling illegal immigration, prostitution and organised crime. Ireland, is unfortunately, following this trend. Receiving countries including Ireland, must address laws and policies such as protectionist and restrictive immigration policies, which prevent for the most part, legal migration and residence, and leave no alternative to exploitation by traffickers for many women. When considering legislation and other measures to combat trafficking in persons, States should also bear in mind their obligations under human rights instruments. Ireland’s membership of the EU will have a considerable influence on the shape of it’s policy and legislation on trafficking in persons. The European Council at Tampere in 1999 undertook to give clear priority to combating trafficking. Various initiatives have been funded under the STOP and DAPHNE programmes. In addition, proposals for Directives relating to trafficking have been made by the European Commission including most recently, a proposal for a Council Directive on the shortterm residence permits issued to victims of action to facilitate illegal immigration or trafficking in human beings who co-operate with the competent authorities. 45 At EU level, Ireland should take the lead in ensuring that the human rights of trafficked persons are enshrined in any forthcoming Directives on trafficking. In addition, at the domestic level, Ireland should incorporate into Irish law without delay the human rights instruments it has ratified and should also ratify instruments specifically relating to migration such as the Migrant Workers Convention and the relevant ILO Conventions. In order to protect women who are trafficked it will be necessary to amend the existing Illegal Immigrants Trafficking Act or enact new legislation which will at a minimum •

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Define Trafficking in line with the internationally recognised definition in the Protocol, thereby covering all types of trafficking. This will ensure that women trafficked for purposes other than prostitution (as well as those trafficked for prostitution) will be able to avail of the protection provided. Recognise the human rights of trafficked persons and ensure that these rights are guaranteed. Ensure, safe and as far as possible voluntary return for trafficked persons. Grant leave to remain in Ireland, if it is not possible for the trafficked person to returned to their country of origin. Any such permission to remain either short or long term should not be linked to the willingness of trafficked persons to give evidence against persons accused of trafficking. Penalise trafficking, both into and out of Ireland, recognising that Ireland, due to its proximity to the UK is likely to be a transit country for trafficked persons rather than a final destination in many cases.

To date, the extent of trafficking in Ireland remains unquantified. It cannot be assumed however, that because very few cases of persons being trafficked into Ireland have come to light so far, that it will not be a major issue in the future. Therefore, Ireland needs to implement legislation and policy to penalise traffickers and to protect the rights of survivors.

44 45

OSCE op cit, p12 COM (2002) 71 final

Secreted Lives: Eastern European Women and Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation in Ireland

Gillian Wylie, Peace Studies, Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin Introduction Trafficking in human beings for various exploitative purposes has become a phenomenon with global reach in recent decades. As neo-liberal globalisation policies have upset the economic tapestries of poorer communities everywhere, people’s need to migrate has grown. Yet state migration policies in the richer world work against such people’s movement, prompting them to seek non-legal routes to migrate (Sassen, 2003; Kaufman et al, 2000: 114-115). Thus globalisation itself is one of the reasons behind the exponential rise in human trafficking and smuggling and the transnational organised crime which exists to facilitate these processes. As all states become drawn in to the globalised economy there is barely a country in the world which cannot be classed as either a country of origin, transit or destination in relation to the trade in human beings (International Human Rights Law Group, 2003). At a pan-European level, this global dynamic is working itself out in relations between the prosperous West and the poorer East. It is estimated that ever since the end of communism this illicit trade has been growing, to the extent that now as many as 500,000 women are trafficked from East to West and sold into prostitution each year (European Parliament Directorate-General for Research, 2000: 12). Ireland has been ranked as one of the most globalised states in the world (Taylor, 2003: 8). Following – indeed perhaps excelling – the policy patterns of the global North, it has an extremely open economy coexisting with restrictive migration policies. Moreover, it has been an enormous economic beneficiary of its involvement with the EU. This context, in addition to the known global reach of trafficking, makes it more than likely that Ireland too is a country of transit and/or destination for the trafficking of human beings. Yet, not much is known about the existence or extent of the phenomenon in Ireland. The first aim of this paper therefore is to offer an assessment of what can be said about this, focusing in particular on the trafficking of women from Eastern Europe for the purpose of prostitution. One thing that will become clear in this attempt to present the ‘Irish case’ is that it is difficult to offer a definitive statement about the extent and nature of trafficking here. This is however, a common problem with research into trafficking where all statistics are admittedly provisional estimates. One obvious reason for this is that trafficking is by definition secretive, involving organised criminals moving people whilst trying to evade the sight of state and law enforcement agencies (European Parliament Directorate-General for Research, 2000: iii). When people are trafficked their lives are meant to be obscured from sight and the nature of the work which they are forced to do and the circumstances in which they are held, compound this. As it will be defined below, using the UN Protocol of 2000, trafficking implies the deception, coercion and exploitation of the victim. These circumstances bring us more starkly than any others to the question of the agency of migrant women with which this conference asked us to engage. While the conference agenda practically asked us to celebrate migrant women as agents of their own fates and transformers of their new place, the situation of trafficked women brings us to a context where agency is hard to discern because the women can readily be seen as victims. It is therefore to this issue that the second part of this paper will turn. Before pursuing the two main themes indicated above, it is necessary to offer a definition of trafficking. For this purpose, the recent UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Particularly Women and Children, will be referred to. On a basic level having such a 1

. Many thanks are due to Maura Connolly and Frances Robinson of Ruhama and an anonymous Garda source for their help in my research.

definition enables us to know what we are looking for when doing empirical research, but on another level acknowledging the compromised nature of the agreed international definition of trafficking stands as an important reminder of the fact that trafficking is not just an empirical, legal or criminal matter but one on which moral, political and feminist perspectives clash. Defining Trafficking Trafficking cannot be left undefined because the term is not as self-explanatory as it first seems. Recent international attempts to codify a definition are testimony to this, as the cumbersome, wordy definition agreed upon by the UN illustrates. According to the UN Protocol (2000) trafficking is to be understood as, (a) An action consisting of the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or position of vulnerability, giving or receiving payments or benefits to achieve consent of a person, having control of another, for the purpose of, exploitation (including at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others, or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude, or the removal of organs). (b) The consent of the victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used.

The verbosity of the definition is partly a consequence of its attempt to be comprehensive, and it does indeed delineate all the ways by which trafficking can be done and for what purposes. Part of the reasoning behind formulating this definition was to separate the victims of trafficking from the smuggled, who are the subject of an accompanying UN Protocol. The inference of this separation is the view that while human smuggling implies a level of consent from those who are smuggled, in the case of trafficking — whether from the outset of their travels or during the process — a person is coerced and exploited and thus cannot be said to have consented to their exploitation. This bold statement of the impossibility of consent to be trafficked is an important consideration for the later discussion of trafficking and agency. As well as offering a comprehensive understanding of the crime, the definition and Protocol in which it is embedded have legal and political value. Legally, ratification of the Trafficking Protocol makes it incumbent upon states to frame their domestic law in line with this definition of the crime and to adopt the further requirements of the Protocol which are designed to punish the traffickers and support the victims. Although some reservation must be sounded here because the Protocol is more stringently worded in terms of what signatories must do to prevent and punish the crime than in what they are encouraged to do in terms of victim support (Jordan, 2002: 2-3). Politically, the very existence of the Convention and its Protocols gives international prominence and commitment to these growing problems (Gallagher, 2001: 976). While the comprehensiveness of the definition may be useful, it is also a mask to the debate and dispute which produced it. The very look of such a wordy definition has the immediate suspicion of compromise about it, and this was indeed the case. The story behind the definition and wider Protocol is one of ideological splits among UN member states and between influential lobby groups. Most starkly this revolved around the issue of prostitution, which divided anti-trafficking feminists as much as states who have different existing policies on the legal status of prostitution. While some feminists who understand all prostitution as exploitative wished to have prostitution per se defined as trafficking, others in the self-styled ‘human rights caucus’ argued that it is possible for adult women to consent to sex work and therefore trafficking had to be defined as separate from prostitution 45

(Doezema, 2001; Gallagher, 2001; Jordan, 2002). The compromised outcome of this debate explains the wording which refers to the ‘exploitation of the prostitution of others’ rather than prostitution itself as exploitation. These divides among anti-trafficking feminists persist and each side has its own understanding of what methods are best in terms of prevention, punishment and protection in response to trafficking but, once again, at the heart of their dispute is the issue of consent and agency. They divide around questions like whether prostitution is necessarily exploitative or if women really can consent to prostitution. The UN Protocol helps us to define what we are looking for when we look for evidence of trafficking — but the debate behind it is equally a reminder that how we understand the position of trafficked women and whether they can be understood as in any way agents is complicated by ideological positioning around issues like prostitution. Trafficking and Ireland As forewarned in the introduction to this paper the evidence as to whether women are being trafficked to Ireland from Eastern Europe for the purpose of sexual exploitation is meagre. Indeed officially the evidence does not exist. Employing the strict Garda usage of the term ‘evidence’, there is no evidence of this form of trafficking because there have been no official complaints made to the police and no cases taken. Moreover during the one raid made by them through the brothels of Dublin last year (the so-called Operation Gladiator), the Gardai found no Eastern European women working as prostitutes in any circumstances. Yet, police evidence alone cannot be relied upon as the only source of revelation about trafficking, for the obvious reasons that traffickers are determined to avoid them and trafficked women are either unable to reach them or would fear to do so. It is widely acknowledged that one key factor in enabling trafficking from countries of origin is corruption amongst police forces, giving trafficked women little reason to trust law officers anywhere. In addition, these women’s position in their states of transit or destination is illegal and they are aware that they would be on ‘the wrong side of the law’ should they manage to access it. This is why many anti-trafficking NGOs have focused their energies on decriminalising the victims and lobbying for the implementation of schemes whereby trafficked women would not be immediately deported after discovery despite being ‘illegal immigrants’ (Aghatise, 2003). The most solid evidence that there have been a small, but indefinable, number of cases in which women have been trafficked to Ireland from Eastern Europe for sexual exploitation comes from the NGO community and most specifically from those involved in Ruhama, a Dublin-based organisation which exists to work with women involved in prostitution.2 In Ruhama’s experience the vast majority of the women with whom they have contact and work continue to be local, yet they have met a small number of women whose stories follow the classic pattern of trafficking so abstractly defined by the UN. The horrible reality beyond the legal definition for women caught in trafficking is revealed in the description of one woman’s experience as recounted by the director of Ruhama, Maura Connolly, Eva is from Eastern Europe. After the fall of communism, the day-to-day struggle for her family became very difficult. Eva heard that there were opportunities for young women to work in Ireland as nannies. Her plan was to send money back home to the family. A recruitment agency provided her with the necessary papers and arranged for a male companion to look after her on the journey and to help her when she arrived in Ireland. Her minder told her that it was important that she didn’t come to the attention of the authorities and that he would ensure that she would have no difficulties with her papers, obtaining work or finding accommodation. She was taken to an apartment directly from the airport and her nightmare began. Her papers were taken from her. Her 2

See http://www.ruhama.ie/aboutus.htm.

minder raped her and then made her have sex with his friends. Every day men would come to the apartment and Eva was forced to have sex with them. She was not allowed out of the apartment and received no money. Her minder provided her food and clothes. One night, some months later, when her minder was asleep she managed to get his keys and leave. Bewildered and frightened with only a few words of English, she wandered the streets of Dublin until the Ruhama outreach team spotted her. Going to the police was not an option for her as, in her country, the police are corrupt. Eva was lucky; the Ruhama project was able to provide her with safe accommodation and over a period of time helped her start a new life in Ireland. The project knows that there are many Evas in Ireland (Connolly, 2001: 13-15). Among the ‘many Evas’, Ruhama would number the many Eastern European women now involved in Ireland’s lap-dancing clubs whom they fear have been trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation (Connolly, 2001: 15). Concerns that these women are being exploited have also been raised in some press reports which have pointed to the constrained lives these women lead as they are escorted to and from the clubs, forbidden wider social interaction and live in crowded accommodation controlled by their employers. Further speculation exists as to whether the women are able to control the money they make or whether it is extorted from them by criminals (Guerin, 2002a; 2002b). Finally, the recent prosecution of one club revealed it to be little more than a front for prostitution (Reynolds, 2003). There is a complication however in defining all lap-dancers as ‘trafficked’ because, until recently, eastern European women were able to gain short term ‘entertainment visas’ in order to be employed as lap-dancers legally in Ireland. This visa regime has been suspended at the moment while the very concerns highlighted in the paragraph above are being investigated, yet the question remains that if these women were here legally and knew they would be lap-dancers can they be said to have been trafficked? When a similar controversy blew up in Northern Ireland, one member of the Women’s Coalition opposed the majority opinion in her party by querying, ‘What is wrong with lapdancing?…I know people who work in what might be called the sex trade: they are there freely’ (McAdam, 2002). The lap dancing controversy therefore illustrates vividly the divides amongst feminists in their understandings of trafficking which were voiced around the UN Protocol. For some, like Ruhama, prostitution and trafficking are not separable. The sex trade is always about the commodification of women’s bodies and their sexual exploitation by those more powerful. Lap dancing, prostitution, trafficking are all manifestations of this sex trade in women’s bodies. For those of an opposing view however, there is a belief that some adult women choose sex work (e.g. as in legal lap-dancing) and therefore it is essential to see trafficking for sexual purposes as a distinct process involving ‘forced prostitution.’ This is a debate which will be returned to in the section below. Alongside the small but growing evidence that Ireland is a destination country for trafficking in women for sexual exploitation, there is also some reason to believe that Ireland is being used as a country of transit. Membership of the EU, the Common Travel Agreement with Britain and the state’s need for low-wage labour make it a convenient context from which to advertise bogus jobs and through which to move people. One extended piece of investigative journalism documented how legitimate Irish job adverts posted on the web were redirected by organised criminals to put women seeking employment into contact with traffickers. When the women believing they were to be waitresses were asked for the size of their breasts and Aids tests they grew suspicious, while the bemused legitimate employer, tracked down in Galway, could not fathom how his advert had become a front for traffickers (Lloyd Roberts, 2002). The extent of the evidence presented here is slim. Those in concerned NGOs do not doubt that there are a small number of women in Ireland from Eastern Europe who have been trafficked for 47

prostitution. Some media reports corroborate their beliefs and portray Ireland as either a country of transit or destination. Interestingly too, there is an acknowledgement from the Garda, that even though the problem has not come to their official attention yet, they expect it to. The Garda source interviewed for this paper is already a member of a Europol working group on trafficking and acknowledges that any criminal activity known to exist in the UK is probably going to affect Ireland eventually. A further complication in the attempt being made here to define the extent of trafficking for sexual exploitation which exists in Ireland, is the dispute over whether all women who work in sex trade are victims of trafficking, as crystallised in the diverging views about lap dancers. Despite the optimistic hope expressed earlier that a definition, such as that from the UN, can be helpful in identifying the phenomenon that is being researched, the politics behind the definition mean that saying what is trafficking and what is not, remains problematic. Obviously what is needed most of all in this project, is more research. It would be crucial to know, for instance, how women working in lap dancing or those who more readily fit the definition of trafficking perceive themselves. Yet, for a researcher this is far from being an easy task, either practically or in terms of research ethics. On a practical level, these women are not accessible as they are constrained from speaking to journalists or researchers (Guerin, 2001a) and there are issues of personal safety for all involved. On an ethical level it is vital for a researcher to be fearful of compounding someone’s exploitation, only this time for academic or journalistic purposes. In considering this point for journalists, a recent edition of the Observer Magazine seemed to distil the problem. While trying to raise the issue of Moldovan women trafficked to the UK, the accompanying photos, showing naked or partially dressed women with their gazes only slightly averted, could be construed as a further sexual exploitation of them (Gibb, 2003: 24-29). For academics like myself, whose personal and professional concerns lead us to do research on trafficking, there are inescapable issues to be faced such as whether and how to speak for or about women whose experience is very different for one’s own, how to avoid essentialising all Eastern European women as trafficked and what ends can be achieved from such research. Awareness of these issues is vital for planning further research but they should not paralyse it. Academics undoubtedly have the social power which comes from our status, the authority given to the written, published word and our research and analytical abilities. The question therefore is how to use such power in responsible ways to reveal the human rights abuse which is trafficking, to deepen understanding of why it occurs and hopefully to empower those working in anti-trafficking and thus to be of use to trafficked women themselves. Aside from deciding how to further this research, what is also needed is to come to a clear position on what constitutes trafficking and whether it is tantamount to prostitution or something different. And this leads us back inescapably to the question of agency and choice. Trafficked Women and Agency Sexual trafficking puts already extremely vulnerable girls and women into the most powerless and dependent situation imaginable (Leidholdt, 1996: 84). For many reasons, it is not difficult to agree with a statement like this. As will be elaborated below, women whose experiences are recognisable in the UN definition have been deceived, coerced and exploited. They are working in the sex industry which attracts only social opprobrium thus rendering them ‘socially dead’ (O’Connell-Davidson, 1998: 133-135). Moreover, they are in a position of powerlessness and dependence in relation to a number of extremely powerful agents – which include the traffickers but also political and economic institutions. The experiences of deception, coercion and exploitation are vividly recounted in Eva’s story quoted above. Her experiences are far from atypical. Most women who end up trafficked believe they are going to legal employment, as evidenced by the account of one Romanian NGO which reported that 48

83% of the women it worked with did not know they were going to be prostitutes at the start of their journeys (Matei, 2003). Coercion is well documented in trafficking, with the use of physical violence, especially rape, prevalent. Equally psychological violence is used to intimidate women, particularly threats to reveal their prostitution to their families. Their exploitation takes the form of prostitution for the material benefit of others and more often than not, they are deprived of their earnings or held in debt bondage. Therefore, as women whose prostitution is being exploited by others, trafficked women lose control over their own bodies and over their own earnings. In addition, women working as prostitutes are in a position of social exclusion and marginalisation. No matter where one stands on the intra-feminist debates about prostitution, there is no doubt that prostitution bears enormous social stigma. As discussed by O’Connell-Davidson, prostitutes transgress what are considered to be acceptable norms of sexual, commercial and (often) legal behaviour and as such become construed as moral and sexual outsiders (O’Connell-Davidson, 1998: 128-129). This attitude to prostitute women is virtually universal and many NGOs working with women after trafficking find it extremely difficult to reintegrate them into their home society because they have acquired the label ‘prostitute’, although against their will (Matei, 2003; Vasisht, 2003). At the local level in Ireland this social exclusion is in existence. Interviewed about the presence of lap dancers accommodated in a house in the middle-class suburb of Ranelagh, one resident expressed her ‘horror’ at learning more about her neighbours and their employment, while others expressed ‘concerns’ (Guerin, 2002a). Extending her argument, O’Connell-Davidson suggests that prostitutes experience a form of social death because in becoming sexual objects available for sale, prostitutes are denied attributes of personhood, such as the ability to engage reciprocally in relationships. Quoting from Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, she notes that the basic reality for those who are socially dead is to be powerless (O’Connell-Davidson, 1998: 135). Contrasting to the powerlessness of women trafficked for sexual exploitation, is the array and power of the agents who exploit them. Most obviously the agents in trafficking are the criminal traffickers who control the process and exercise physical power and powers of command over the trafficked. With vast profits of an estimated $7 billion to be made annually from trafficking and very slight legal and penal sanctions to be faced if caught, the traffickers have much to gain from their involvement in the sex trade (European Parliament Directorate-General for Research, 2000: 1). Beyond these individuals and the organised crime gangs they form, there are other agents in the process. Corrupt police officials have already been mentioned, and to this must be added other state agencies such as border guards. Moreover states themselves can be agents in trafficking, as politicians and bureaucrats turn a blind eye to the trade and profiteer from it in terms of any remittances which women become able to send home. Finally, as mentioned at the outset of this paper, the policies of neo-liberalism being pursued by the IMF and the World Bank and the pressures these place on poor states and peoples can also be seen as making these institutions agents in trafficking. For Kevin Bales it is this nexus of corrupt officialdom, organised criminals and the troubles brought upon societies by economic impoverishment and social upheaval which makes ‘modern day slavery’ possible. Modern forms of slavery ‘can only arise in situations where the social order is chaotic and the forces of the state are often a source of menace in themselves due to their implication in organised crime’ (Bales, 1999: 29-30). The powerlessness of the trafficked and the power of the people, institutions and social attitudes which entrap them, seem to deny the possibility of agency to women caught in what can been described as a new slave trade. They have lost control over fundamentals such as their bodies, work, time, social interactions and future choices and the powers that be behind trafficking conspire to keep them there. Yet, is this the only conclusion we can or should reach about trafficked women and agency? There are two counter concerns which need to be broached here. Firstly whether the discourse surrounding trafficking is in fact depriving women of agency and secondly how to understand the choice of the 17% of women who go abroad knowing they will be prostituted. 49

Trafficking, Migration, ‘Sex Work’ and Choice All anti-trafficking NGOs exist because they understand trafficking to be an abuse of women’s human rights and they are all fully appraised, through their work, of the horrendous realties which affect women who are caught in trafficking. There are divides however in the anti-trafficking community, which begin with philosophical differences about issues like prostitution and end with advocating different emphases in tactics for prevention, protection and rehabilitation. One disputed tactic is the question of how drastic information campaigns should be that seek to warn women of the dangers of trafficking. While some campaigns, such as a recent Moldovan poster, use explicit pictures of women in the physical grip of traffickers, other NGOs are loath to use shock tactics (even if this is not to the liking of the government funders of such campaigns). One such organisation disavowing lurid anti-trafficking campaigns is the Eastern European NGO, La Strada (Skrivankova, 2003). Their reason for doing so is the concern that spreading a profound fear of trafficking has the consequence of dissuading women from migrating. In effect, government or NGO campaigns which inculcate fear in women about the possibility of falling into the hands of traffickers make migration seem inevitably dangerous and thus limit women’s choices (Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, 2002). The irony is that anti-trafficking measures as much as trafficking itself can delimit women’s agency, as anti-trafficking discourse is used to make ‘good women’ stay at home (Dasgupta, 2003). An organisation like La Strada therefore is committed to defending women’s right to migrate by providing information about what is legitimate employment abroad and what is suspicious and giving ‘safety tips’ for the fifty most popular countries of destination (La Strada, 2003). Seen in this light the decision to migrate, the determination to seek a better life and the acts required to put this into practice are instances in which women act as agents of their own fate, even if the consequences are unforeseen and their agency becomes compromised. La Strada belongs to that wing of the anti-trafficking community which does not necessarily see all prostitution as exploitative or as synonymous with trafficking. They concur with the idea that some women may choose to seek out sex work abroad. If 83% of women did not know that they were going from Romania to be prostituted in the West, this implies that 17% did know that this awaited them. Drawing on this acknowledged awareness, some discussions of Eastern European women working in prostitution place a strong emphasis on the degree of rational choice which some women exercise in relation to entering sex work abroad. For example, a contribution from a member of a prostitute’s collective in London at the ‘Beyond Trafficking’ seminar organised by the NGO Change (March 2003), suggested that there are some women from Eastern Europe in Soho who have been trafficked and some who are there freely. On this basis several anti-trafficking NGOs are keen to press states to do more to protect women who work in prostitution, to offer rights to sex workers and to legalise prostitution. The idea that it is possible to choose sex work seems to suggest again that women who knowingly do so are acting as agents and are not simply victims. This view is of course vehemently opposed by those anti-traffickers who see all prostitution as oppressive and exploitative. Once again therefore we reach an impasse between the dichotomised views which have run through this paper. In moving towards a conclusion therefore, I will offer a view on this vexed issue of trafficking and agency and from that view develop a framework which looks to the root causes of trafficking and possible preventative measures. Limited Choices and Constrained Agency It is doubtful that any person can ever entirely be deprived of their agency. Indeed, in extremis, as Julia O’Connell Davidson points out, no one can completely enslave another because the oppressed person can always choose death rather than submission (O’Connell-Davidson, 1998). No matter how 50

exploited a person is, they do remain a human agent with at least one choice. Yet, such a choice offers very cold comfort and there is little doubt that once embroiled in trafficking, women’s possibilities to shape their own lives are utterly constrained and their human agency diminished. Beyond this fundamental level, it has been suggested above that women remain agents of their fates as they make choices which can lead them, knowingly or inadvertently, into trafficking. These include the choice to migrate or the choice to apply for an entertainment visa to lap dance in Ireland or the choice to work as a prostitute abroad. What remains problematic about these arguments however, is the concept of choice being used simplistically in them. In effect, many women in Eastern Europe are not making these types of choices from a position of freedom and limitless opportunities. Indeed gender analysis of post-communist societies has suggested the very opposite. Many studies produced throughout the 1990s have suggested that women have suffered disproportionately from the end of state socialism in Eastern Europe. Prior to 1989 the realities of women’s continuing ‘triple burden’ of home, workplace and political involvement meant that socialism was not as liberating for women in practice as in promise (Holmes, 1996: 250). They did however, along with men, possess economic, social and political security. In the last ten years, women’s guaranteed presence in parliament has gone and their numbers in terms of political representation have slumped. Socially, some have detected a reassertion of patriarchy. The implications of such social attitudes, compounded by economic restructuring and privatisation, have been to ensure that women make up a disproportionate number of the unemployed (Haughey, 1999; Funk and Mueller, 1993; Sperling 1999: chapter 5). One example from the Ukraine notes that women make up 90% of those made unemployed by the transition (Luckhoo, 2003: 6). Consequently, commentators have begun to detect ‘the feminisation of poverty’ as a post-communist phenomenon (Einhorn, 1993). For those women who do remain in work there is a lack of legal frameworks to protect them from harassment and discrimination. Thus in Russia the phrase ‘sexual terror’ has come in to use to describe women’s experience of many workplaces (Pilkington, 1996: 31). Another postcommunist social phenomenon has been the mass production and availability of pornography which was officially absent from the puritanical Soviet Union and Eastern bloc. This overt commodification and exploitation of women’s bodies is part of the reassertion of patriarchy and the flourishing of the sex industry (Kon and Riordan, 1996). An understanding of this background problematises the idea that women make free choices either to migrate, enter ‘sex work’ or risk throwing their lot in with smugglers who become traffickers. The shock therapies foisted on Eastern European economies have impacted most damagingly on women, their lives are insecure and their opportunities limited. Recognising the reality of poverty and political voicelessness of the women involved helps to negotiate a way through the confusing divergences within the anti-trafficking debate. As Dennis Altman has written: while some feminist analyses seem to conflate all forms of sex for money in ways which deny any agency on the part of the worker, it also seems likely that those who ‘choose’ prostitution do so under conditions of considerable constraint (Altmann, 2001: 113). It is in recognising these conditions of constraint as part of the root causes of trafficking that antitrafficking strategies which address these fundamental causes can be devised. Conclusion The stories of women who have been trafficked and the complicated debates which surround their position, do bring us most starkly to the question of whether trafficked women are agents of their own fates. Women whose experiences follow the classic pattern of trafficking have been deceived, coerced and exploited. Even for those who have not been initially deceived, the treatment they may receive from their traffickers further into the process is such an abuse of human rights that, according to the 51

UN Protocol, they cannot be said to have consented to their exploitation. Taking one step further back however, it might be said that women are agents as they choose to migrate, resort to smuggling or even to sex work abroad. Yet, the idea that these are choices freely made are complicated by the impoverished and insecure contexts in which women in Eastern Europe live. In sum, while ‘all human beings have agency…agency within an oppressive context severely limits and skews the available options’ (Luckhoo, 2003: 6). The contexts which make prostitution an option and women vulnerable to trafficking are related to the gendered consequences of the transition from socialism to capitalism. They are related to unregulated economies and employers who are left free by governments to discriminate against women. They are related to political exclusion and powerlessness as women’s parliamentary presence is gone. They are related to social attitudes which endorse the sexual exploitation of women. These are huge issues but they are the very root causes of trafficking. They are also substantive political, economic and social issues which can be dealt with (Jordan, 2002: 30). Once they are – and Eastern European women really can be agents of their own fates – trafficking will be diminished. References Aghatise, Esohe. 2003. ‘Developing responses in co-operation: the case of Turin’. Unpublished paper, Beyond Trafficking: Experiences from the Ground, a seminar organised by CHANGE and Action Aid, London 7th March. Altman, Dennis. 2001. Global Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bales, Kevin. 1999. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkley: University of California Press. Connolly, Maura. 2001. ‘Trafficking in women for sexual exploitation: a human rights issue.’ Womenzone (a publication of the National Women’s Council of Ireland), 7/June: 13-15. Dasgupta, Abhijit. 2003. ‘Conclusions’. Unpublished paper, Beyond Trafficking: Experiences from the Ground, a seminar organised by CHANGE and Action Aid, London 7th March. Doezema, Jo. 2001. ‘Ouch! Western feminists’ ‘wounded attachment’ to the Third World prostitute.’ Feminist Review, 67: pp16-38. Einhorn, Barbara. 1993. Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe. London: Verso. European Parliament Directorate-General for Research. 2000. Trafficking in Women. Working Paper, Civil Liberties Series, LIBE 109 EN, 3-2000. Funk, Nanette and Muller, Magda. (eds.). Gender Politics Post Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. London: Routledge. Gallagher, Anne. 2001. ‘Human rights and the new UN protocols on trafficking and migrant smuggling: a preliminary assessment’. Human Rights Quarterly, 23/4: 975-1004. Gibb, John. 2003. ‘Sex and slavery.’ The Observer Magazine, 23rd February: 24-29. Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. 2002. The Bangkok Call For Justice for Women Migrant Workers. Released at the GATW conference (6-8 November). http://www.inet.co.th/org.gaatw/Information/BangkokCall.htm Guerin, Jimmy. 2002a. ‘Lap dancers neighbours of McDowell.’ Sunday Independent, 11th August. http://lists.partners-intl.net/pipermail/women-east-west/2002-September/001887.html Guerin, Jimmy. 2002b. ‘Lap dancing clubs hit by permit ban.’ Sunday Independent, 1st September. http://lists.partners-intl.net/pipermail/women-east-west/2002-September/001889.html Haughey, Nuala. 1999. ‘Women lose gains made in Eastern Europe.’ Irish Times 27th September. Holmes, Leslie. 1996. Post Communism: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press International Human Rights Law Group. 2003. Resources and Contacts on Human Trafficking Compiled by the Initiative Against Trafficking in Persons, the International Human Rights Law Group. http://www.hrlawgroup.org/resources/content/Trafficking_Biblio.pdf Jordan, Anne. 2002. The Annotated Guide to the Complete UN Trafficking Protocol. http://www.hrlaw.group.org/initiatives/trafficking_persons 52

Kaufman, Eleanore (et al). 2000. Gender and International Migration in Europe: Employment, Welfare and Politics. London: Routledge. Kon, Igor and Riordan, James. 1993. Sex and Russian Society. London: Pluto. La Strada: Prevention of the Traffic in Women. Information Leaflet (PO Box 305 11121 Praha, Czech Republic). Leidholdt, Dorchen. 1996. ‘Sexual trafficking of women in Europe: a human rights crisis for the EU,’ in R. Amy Elman (ed.) Sexual Politics and the European Union: The New Feminist Challenge. Providence: Berghahn Books. Lloyd-Roberts, Sue. 2002. ‘Adventures on the skin trail: There is a new route to sexual slavery in Europe, and it leads from the former Soviet Union to the sex clubs of Soho.’ The Independent (London), 22nd September. http://fpmail.friends-partners.org/pipermail/stop-traffic/2000September/000176.html Luckhoo, Fiona. 2003. Trafficking in the World Today: A Briefing. London: Change Anti-Trafficking Programme. Matei, Iana. 2003. ‘Realities of reintegration in Romania.’ Unpublished paper, Beyond Trafficking: Experiences from the Ground, a seminar organised by CHANGE and Action Aid, London 7th March. McAdam, Noel. 2002. ‘Call for Lap Dance Clubs to be Closed.’ Belfast Telegraph,18th November. http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=353390. O’Connell-Davidson, Julia. 1998. Prostitution, Power and Freedom London: Polity. Pilkington, Hilary (ed.). 1996. Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia. London: Routledge. Reynolds, Paul. 2003. ‘Lap Dancing Club’s License Withdrawn.’ http://www.rte.ie/news/2003/0306/newsinbrief.html Sassen, Saskia. 2003. ‘Trafficking in the context of globalisation and migration.’ Unpublished paper, Beyond Trafficking: Experiences from the Ground, a seminar organised by CHANGE and Action Aid, London 7th March. Skrivankova, Klara. 2003. ‘Looking at prevention.’ Unpublished paper, Beyond Trafficking: Experiences from the Ground, a seminar organised by CHANGE and Action Aid, London 7th March. Sperling, Valerie. 1999. Organising Women in Contemporary Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Cliff. 2003. ‘Ireland ranked as the most globalised of 62 states due to exports.’ Irish Times, 8th January: 8. UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Particularly Women and Children, a Supplement to the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime. http://www.odccp.org/crime_cicp_convention.html#final Vasisht, Mita. 2003. ‘Daring to dream: an innovative model of rehabilitation.’ Unpublished paper, Beyond Trafficking Experiences from the Ground, a seminar organised by CHANGE and Action Aid, London 7th March.

Migrant Women Transforming the Face of Ireland Dil Wickremasinghe

Good Afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mihindikoolasuriya Nancy Lea Dilhani Wickremasinghe… Jesus, where did you get a name like that!!! If I had a euro for each time I heard that… I would be a millionaire! Everyone calls me Dil and where I come from that means “Heart” but here in Ireland I am reduced to a herb that often accompanies salmon! Allow me to give you the grand tour of my life. I am 29 years old and I was born in Italy however I am a Sri Lankan national. This is because I left Italy before I turned 18 as my parents who are also Sri Lankan, separated. In Italy birth alone does not entitle an individual to citizenship. I finished school in Colombo and when I was 21 I joined an Airline in the Arabian Gulf as a flight attendant. I was based in Bahrain for 5 years and it was fantastic as it was such little island whose population were mainly expatriates. The airline crew comprised of 54 nationalities. Each flight was an eye opener as we travelled to so many destinations and every crew I worked with seemed like a mini UN conference! The best thing about it was that there never was any friction between the crew even though each flight was an assortment of diverse cultures and religions. During my time in the airline I met my partner. She is Irish and she is the reason why I am standing here today despite all the butterflies in my tummy! We left the airline together to come to Ireland and start our life together as a couple. At first our parents were horrified, especially mine, as they are Jehovah’s Witnesses, and could not understand it but gradually they have become accustomed to the thought of having a daughter in law rather than a son in law! We have gained the acceptance of our families, friends and employers however; this does not apply to the Irish Government. From the time I moved to Ireland, which was three years ago, it has been a struggle to stay here. I was fortunate enough to come across my present employers who applied for a work permit for me that allows me to remain here although it has to be renewed annually. The Irish 54

Government does not recognize same sex couples even though it is part of the European Union. Many of the other EU member states have given legal recognition to same-sex partnerships. In the Netherlands, the definition of marriage includes same-sex relationships so lesbians, gays and bisexuals have the same partnership rights as heterosexual married couples. In France, Denmark and Germany, same-sex couples cannot get married but can register their "life partnership" to give it legal status. Various other European countries, most notably Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland have accorded varying degrees of legal recognition to the rights of same sex couples. In Ireland, the definition of marriage does not include same-sex couples so they cannot become legally married. There is also no provision for the legal registration of same-sex partnerships. This means that same-sex couples do not have equal rights to heterosexual married couples. www.equality.ie If we were to move to the UK, I would have the right to work and live on the basis of my relationship irrespective of what gender my partner is. Therefore if we were to pack our bags and drive to Belfast tomorrow I would not need a work permit. The truth of the matter is that if we were a heterosexual couple living in Ireland today there would not be any immigration difficulties for us at all. The Equality Authority in Ireland has 9 grounds on which discrimination is unlawful and one of them is Sexual Orientation that covers heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual orientation. The Irish legislation violates this, as it does not give same sex couples equal rights. Discrimination is generally defined as the differential treatment of individuals or groups based on gender, race, religion, age, marital or parental status, disability, sexual orientation, political opinions, socio-economic background, trade union membership and activities, and so on. www.equality.ie Immigration laws are not the only discriminatory laws in my regard, so are the employment laws. I have been with my employer for the past 2 Â˝years and I am told that I am an exemplary employee. In the past years I have worked extremely hard and paid my taxes just like everyone else. However my service to my company does not hold any weight especially with regards to the unfair dismissal act. If tomorrow my company was to discontinue my services or if it were to run into financial difficulties and would be forced to close - I would have to leave the state as soon as possible and reapply for a permit from my country of residence. Permits are almost impossible to get at present so the wait would be extensive. This would be an absolute disaster! I would not even want to imagine how the separation would affect my partner and me emotionally, not too mention the mortgage and other financial commitments we have. What if I could not get a permit? My partner would have to dispose of the new home, which we worked so hard for and move to Sri Lanka to be with me. Sri Lanka has been for the past 19 years and continues to be in a state of emergency due its terrorist disturbances. It is not a safe environment to live in and as the economy is unstable finding a job would not be easy. Another factor that deters us from moving to Sri Lanka is the fact that Sri Lanka condemns homosexuality and deems it as a punishable act. If sentenced, one is obligated to serve 10 years imprisonment. So basically, if I lost my job tomorrow â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I would be in very deep trouble. Gosh, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s amazing I sleep at night! Over a year and half ago we contacted a solicitor regarding our situation and made an application for residency. The application was based on 3 aspects. The first one being that I am in a committed relationship with an Irish national. We supplied bills, bank statements and character reference letters from all our friends and family to support the depth of our devotion to one another. Then, the application referred to the Civil War in Sri Lanka and that it would not be safe for me to return, especially as I mentioned before homosexuality is a punishable offence in my country. Finally, the last aspect concerned my partner, if I were not able to remain in Ireland my partner would move with 55

me to Sri Lanka therefore endangering the life of an Irish citizen. The application was a fair expense for us to incur but we were hopeful that it would be granted. So now a year and half later we have not received any news regarding the matter. Our solicitor has advised us that she will send a reminder along with our present details and what we have achieved so far. If the application is declined we are told that we may have to approach the European courts. These legal procedures may cost us over € 20,000. Even then we are not guaranteed to achieve what we set out to accomplish. Ever since my partner and I embarked on our journey together we have had so many knocks but we have always pulled through it and found that at the end of the battle our love has been strengthened. I must confess that I have busied myself so that my mind does not dwell too much on how uncertain my life in Ireland is. Surely, life itself is uncertain enough as it is. In moments such as these when I am forced to face the reality that tomorrow it could all go horribly wrong I feel physically ill. All of us here today know how it is to be treated differently because of who we are. Discrimination comes in so many forms. Why must we be so afraid of what goes against the grain. After all aren’t we all just trying to make the most of this life that we have been gifted with? Why make it harder by erecting barriers amongst us? Discrimination has touched all of us in some way, if it’s not the colour of your skin it’s your religion or it’s your accent or it’s where you live or how much money you make – the list is endless. We are living in the 21st century where education is so widespread and the world has grown so much smaller with the help of modern technology. We no longer have any excuse to entertain any form of discrimination. I have grown to really love Ireland. I have been here long enough to appreciate the beauty of its people and its culture. I have got used to the weather and even the accent is beginning to rub off on me – that alone should qualify me for Irish citizenship. On a serious note, I am not bothered about attaining Irish citizenship all I want is too be able to live here with my partner without the need for permits and without constant fear that I might have to leave and give up the fruits of my labour in Ireland. That is my dream. This room today is full of dreams – I hope they all come true as this country and this world would be a better place if they did. I hope that all our efforts combined in this conference today will bring us a step closer to our dream which is changing the face of Ireland as after all it is our home.

International Women: Prison Experiences in Ireland Christina Quinlan, School of Communications, DCU Women are imprisoned in Ireland two prisons, in the Dochas Centre, a new purpose built female prison within the Mountjoy Prison complex, and in Limerick Prison, the oldest operating prison in Ireland. Women are also ‘imprisoned’ in the Central Mental Hospital in Dublin. The Dochas Centre, the biggest or main women’s prison, can accommodate 82 women at capacity, Limerick Prison can accommodate 18 women, while the Central Mental Hospital generally accommodates three women from the prison system. Currently women in prison in Ireland represent about 3% of the prison population. On any day in Ireland there are between 100 and 110 women in prison and about 3,000 men. In this paper I want to consider the international women in our prisons and I want to consider, for a few minutes, the manner in which they transform Ireland. In some empirical work with Mountjoy Prison records I established that over a period of one year, 25th September 2000 - 25th of September 2001, 751 women were committed to Mountjoy Female Prison, and of these 751 women, 305 were non-Irish nationals. The women were mostly European women, almost 200 of them, 62 were from Eastern Europe, there were more than 50 from Africa, 43 from Asia and 23 from South America. Many of these women were women deemed by the authorities here to be ‘aliens’ and they were in the prison awaiting deportation. The remaining women were in the prison charged with a variety of offences from drug trafficking and money laundering to vagrancy and begging. In recent years, an increasing proportion of Ireland’s female prison population has been comprised of international drug couriers. They have represented up to between twenty to twenty-five percent of Ireland’s imprisoned women and most of them come from South Africa. The South African women I interviewed brought cannabis into Ireland, a drug that is legal for personal use in many jurisdictions, most recently in the UK. The South American women, the woman from Swaziland and the Jamaican woman all brought cocaine. Drug trafficking for the couriers is neither terribly lucrative nor terribly profitable, but among the traffickers it is the couriers who are the most visible and because of this, this visibility, the women’s criminal activities are easily prosecuted. Their crimes are constructed as serious, their trials are public and visible, and their prison sentences, when they are sentenced, are long. International drug couriers in Ireland are currently dealt with in the courts under The Criminal Justice Act 1999, which amended the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977, legislating for a mandatory minimum prison sentence of ten years for anyone caught in possession of more than 10,000 pounds, (12,700 Euro), worth of drugs for sale or supply. When this legislation was introduced, there was a degree of disquiet over the issue of judicial independence, however the judiciary has exercised independence and this independence is manifest particularly in the disparate and apparently arbitrary sentences imposed. Since mandatory sentencing was introduced, some of these women have been sentenced to ten years; some to seven years and some to four years; some were released on review and some on appeal; and some are serving or have served their entire sentences. So who are these women Of the women in my study, seven were on remand, one had been sentenced to ten years, reduced to seven on appeal, two had been sentenced to seven years and three had been sentenced to five years. They were from Jamaica, one woman, Brazil, two women, one was from Swaziland, and nine from South Africa: from the cities of Pretoria, Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg. The 13 women were aged between 53 and 23 years, the average age being 34 years. The women, black and white women, 57

were predominantly single women, either widowed or separated or unmarried and unpartnered, with one to four young children to support, only two of the women were childless; one of the South African women was pregnant during her stay in the Prison, she was deported before the birth of her baby. These were all poor women and while they all had some education, only two had any formal training or professional qualifications, both were hairdressers. Apart from these two, none of the women could have been described as skilled workers. One of the women was an artist, and was so described in the media in Ireland, but this woman had never painted for a living. They had worked in shops, in factories, as street vendors, selling vegetables from home and in the sex trade. The women I interviewed constructed their identities entirely in terms of their relationships and their familial roles, as mothers, daughters, wives and lovers, as homemakers and providers. The relationships the women discussed were traditional male/female relationships and the women were deeply committed to their relationships, those in relationships, and deeply committed to the thought or the ideal of a relationship, those not in relationships. Within those traditional relationships the women had traditional concepts of gender roles: they spoke of ‘being taken care of’ by their boyfriends, husbands and fathers; some spoke of the insurmountable blow the loss of that care had been, for those who had had it and lost it. The women represented their identities in terms of home and the family, one woman could remember when she first came to prison, worrying about a dinner set she’d just bought, worrying about her pots and pans, ‘silly stuff really’, she said. She said that it’s lonely in prison, so lonely it’s terrible, ‘especially’, she said, ‘if you’re a woman who likes being a woman and likes being with a man’. Juxtaposing Identities Most of the women I interviewed did not, despite the prison’s great force in fixing identities, identify themselves with criminality or construct their behaviour as criminal. Some explained their circumstances in terms of misunderstandings, intercultural and otherwise, for example one woman commented that cannabis in South Africa is like herbs, like medicine, that all the old people cook and drink cannabis. This in part explains the capacity of the women to resolutely resist and reject a criminal identity. One woman said that prison hadn’t rehabilitated her because she wasn’t criminal to begin with; she said prison hadn’t made her hard, it had made her sensitive about other people who are in prison and to talk about prison. Another woman said, ‘I don’t know in this country but in our country they think people who are in prison are bad: I used to think that myself, now I know it’s not like that, I’ve been also, so not all the people in prison are bad.’ Another said that she liked people from outside the prison coming in to visit or to tour the prison, because she said, ‘some people think we are criminals and we’re not, so its good that people from outside come in and see us, that this is what we are and all we are. I needed money for fees for my child’s school’. Complex Identities/Binary Identities There are a number of juxtaposed or binary identities among the prisoners in the Irish Female Prison, obviously there are remand and sentenced prisoners, there are short and long term prisoners, there are sick and there are well prisoners. There are also black and white prisoners and there are Irish nationals and non-Irish nationals and there are, of course and significantly, drug addicts and drug couriers among the prisoners. I have on occasion within the prison heard words such as ‘bleendin’ foreigners’ and accusations such as, ‘that stuff you brought here has me the way I am’. In my analysis of the interviews I conducted with the Irish women prisoners I established that the non Irish national women were seen by the Irish nationals as all living together in the same house, the house with the most freedom in the prison. They were seen as sticking together, as looking down on the Irish women, and as getting all the resources available, including early release from prison sentences, often severe prison sentences for serious crimes. Typical comments were as follows:

‘some of us think that the black girls get more, and they do, they get everything off the Government. I know they don’t get any visits, but there’s plenty of girls don’t get any visits, or have any contacts on the outside.’ Or for example, ‘It’s unfair that the African women walk of from serious charges, we have children too, that’s very unfair.’ This construction of the foreign women was very prevalent and it had and has consequences for them and their experiences of imprisonment. Another critical construction of the women, in terms of their experiences of imprisonment, is their construction as ‘quite middle class’ by Prison authorities. They are perceived as women with choices, as relatively powerful women. This may be because they provide such a sharp contrast with many of the Irish women in the prison, particularly the chronic addicts and recidivists who comprise the greater part of the Irish female prison population, but wherever this construct of the women emanates from, I believe it colours the view the judiciary and the Prison Service takes of them and their deviant activities and I believe it effects their prison sentences and their sentence reviews. Transforming Ireland I think, on reflection, that there are a number of ways in which these women transform Ireland. The first is through the crimes they commit, many of the international women in our prisons are international drug couriers, a crime, as I said, constructed in Ireland and indeed through out the world as a serious crime. And so these women are transforming our female prison profile through the perceived seriousness of their crimes, and thus the perceived seriousness of the criminal activity of women in prison in Ireland. Then, of course, related to the perceived seriousness of the crimes are the significant sentences passed on these women. Where most of the women tried for criminal offences in Ireland receive extremely short custodial sentences, for example only 3% of the 751 women committed to Mountjoy Prison in that year, September 2000 to September 2001, received prison sentences of one year or over, these women are generally sentenced to four to six years in prison and these long prison sentences, beyond the appalling impact they have on the women themselves and their families, impact on the statistical profile of women in prison in Ireland. We now have in Ireland substantial numbers of women serving substantial prison sentences for crimes deemed to be serious. Of course, in turn, significant numbers of women receiving long custodial sentences impacts on, or transforms if you like, the female prison in Ireland, its structures and management and the prison experiences it provides for women. And of course the women themselves, significant numbers of them, able, intelligent, physically well women, receiving substantial prison sentences, impact on or transform the women’s prison, its ethos and its energy. These women also transform Ireland, through their imagined migrant, imprisoned perspectives on or visions of Ireland. Ireland is, for these women in their imprisoned state, an imagined place. Ireland: An Imagined Place These women are transforming Ireland in terms of the perspectives they develop of Ireland, Ireland is for them an imagined place. Benedict Anderson said that places and the people of places, are as they are because others thus imagine them. The women in the prison are isolated from our community, they are within Ireland but they are not of Ireland, they are within Ireland but separate from Ireland. They must imagine Ireland. They must imagine how it must be, how it is. They conjure Ireland up from the perspective they had before they came. They conjure Ireland up from South African TV shows, from pictures and postcards, and from the descriptions and discourses of the traffickers employing them. They conjure Ireland up from their journeys here. They conjure Ireland up from their experiences with customs officials, their experiences with our Garda and Garda Stations, from 59

their experiences of court and of courtroom holding cells. And they conjure Ireland up from discourse with women in the prison, from discourse with the staff of the prison and the prison visitors and of course they conjure Ireland up from TV programmes and newspaper articles. The routes to Ireland, for these women, are routes to an imagined place, and as they imagine Ireland, they transform it. Their perspective of Ireland is itself imprisoned and they communicate this imprisoned perspective to each other and to their families and so this imagined place that is Ireland for them, imagined from and within an imprisoned perspective, becomes also Ireland to others and so Ireland is transformed. Conclusions The international women in the our women’s prison are transforming Ireland in the first place in that they almost double the population of the women committed annually to our prisons. They have changed the profile of the female prison population and are transforming Ireland through their impact on the statistics in the female prison. Before them and apart from them, there are very few serious female criminals in our prisons. Indeed my statistics on the female prison population in Ireland are remarkable in their representation of the trivial nature of the criminal activity in which women engage in Ireland, the petty, personal or sexual nature of female criminality in Ireland. It is currently thus as it was historically. But these women have changed that, now in Ireland we have relatively substantial numbers of serious female criminals, at least, as I said, statistically speaking. We now, in Ireland, have substantial numbers of women serving substantial prison sentences. We now in Ireland have a transformed Irish female prison and Irish female prison population. Now there are sober, intelligent women imprisoned in our prisons for years at a time, sober and intelligent women in a prison used to imprisoning primarily addicted women, women who come and quickly go again, and then of course come again as quickly. We now have a globalised female prison population transforming the Irish female prison through their presence, indeed through their prolonged presence and transforming public perception of female criminality in Ireland. I have spent afternoons in the women’s prison listening to women singing in our prison yards, singing songs of South Africa, groups of women, singing group to group, refrain and reprise, songs of South Africa. These women have wrought changes in the female prison most significantly in terms of educational provision. These women have placed different demands on the staff of the female prison; they have different needs from the needs of the greater part of the Irish national population imprisoned here. In terms of transformations and the international women in our female prison, the crime is serious, and this is new, the sentence is long, and this is new but the act is old, it is as old as women’s ways, as old as begging and as old as prostitution. And perhaps I could argue in the final analysis, that these women are failing to transform Ireland, in their adherence to women’s ways, women’s ways of providing, always vulnerable, always visible and always minimally rewarding. And so this is Ireland and these are the women we imprison. References Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso.

Filipina nurses working in the Irish Health Services: Do experiences of prejudice affect integration in the workplace and lower self-esteem? Virginie Noël University of Liège, Belgium Abstract According to Tajfel’s social identity theory, belonging to a devalued social group, like a minority ethnic group, should harm one’s self-esteem. However, studies have shown that members of devalued groups keep a level of self-esteem as high as that of members of dominant groups. Individuals thus use protective strategies, like for example the minimisation of the effect of discrimination on their lives, to protect self-esteem. These protective strategies are investigated in relation to prejudice encountered by individuals who have migrated to and work in Ireland. Participants are nurses from the Philippines who work in the Irish Health Services. Their level of self-esteem and self-protective strategies are measured by questionnaire survey. Subjective integration in the workplace, as well as satisfaction with their lives in Dublin, are also measured. Results show a high level of self-esteem, and a minimisation of discrimination that can be interpreted as a protective strategy, as well as a link between the experience of prejudice and integration and between the experience of prejudice and life satisfaction. Introduction This paper aims at presenting the study I am currently undertaking on Filipina nurses working in Dublin. The perspective taken is based on social psychological theory. Thus social events and effects are analyzed from the point of view of the individual. This study investigates the relationship between the experience of prejudice and the protection of self esteem in a hostile environment. It aims at isolating some of the mechanisms that allow victims of discrimination or members of a disadvantaged group to maintain a high level of self-esteem. For this purpose, the specific case of Filipina nurses working in the Irish Health Services is taken into account. It is important to note that the results presented here are only preliminary, since this study is still in process. They are to be taken as such, as indicators of tendencies rather than confirmed results. Context of this study The participants of this study are nurses who have migrated from the Philippines to Ireland, and who now work in the Irish Health Services. By migrating to Ireland, they have faced many unsettling changes in their lives, including having to leave their families behind. Filipina nurses were chosen for this study because their presence is relatively new in Ireland. The first nurses were recruited around 1994, and large numbers only started to arrive recently (An Bord Altrainas, Registration Statistics, 2001). In this situation of relative novelty, both the migrant worker and the host country must adapt and face new challenges, thus one can expect occasional problems. The migrants’ self-esteem and life satisfaction can suffer in the process of migration (Nesdale et al, 1997). Perceived discrimination has shown to have a negative effect on levels of self-esteem (Pak, Dion, & Dion, 1991; Gil & Vega, 1996). The nurses work in an environment that has been shown to be hostile, and even discriminatory (e.g., Irish Examiner, 21/10/2000; Intelligo Software HR and Payroll Newsletter). At best, they are accepted, but still seen as „different“; and at worst, they have faced bullying and exploitation (Malone, 2002). 61

The friendly and gentle character associated with Filipino culture may be a disadvantage in this context, because they are perceived as easy to exploit (Church, 1987). As a nurse told me: „It is difficult for us to speak up to the doctor, we do not like to cause problems, we’re small, and friendly, it is difficult. “ Guthrie and Jacobs (1966) describe the great importance placed on politeness, hospitality, patterns of deference, reciprocal obligations and vigilance to the temperament of others in Filipino culture. Deference and vigilance to other’s state of mind are essential to keep harmonious relationships. Concern for other’s feelings and humility is valued as well. Filipinos tend to be polite to the extend of personal inconvenience (Cantos & Rivera, 1996). The Filipino term ‘amor proprio’ refers to selfesteem. When a Filipino’s ‘amor proprio’ is hurt, there is a tendency to preserve personal dignity by silence, to demonstrate self-pride (Giger, & Davidhizar, 1999: 407). One description of Filipino people was written by a Filipino, Batacan (cited in Guthrie & Jacobs, 1966). Even though his study dates back to 1956, the traits described are still an accurate description of the Filipino mind today. He describes typical Filipino traits as follows: (1) hospitality, (2) modesty, (3) politeness, (4) bravery and patriotism, (5) patience and ability to bear pain, (6) love of home and devotion to family ties, (7) high sense of personal dignity, (8) religiousness and love for Christian principles. The traits associated to the Filipino personality could show to be detrimental to them in the context of migration. Modesty, politeness, deference etc. could be misunderstood for lack of „character“, and they could be perceived as being weak and easy to exploit. In this context, we can agree to see the group of Filipino and Filipina nurses as a vulnerable group, exposed to discrimination. At the same time, one must not forget that they are also a valued group inside the medical environment. They are renowned for their skills and patience. This double-side attitude towards this group could lead to conflicting feelings within its members: on one side, valued for their skills; on the other subject to exploitation or discrimination because of their origin. Feelings of pride, efficacy, and professionalism could be undermined by feelings of sadness, insecurity and exclusion. Another important aspect of this study is the changing Irish society. Ireland is still in the process of reacting and adapting to relatively new movements of in-migration. There is a trend in the general public towards thinking of migrants as a burden, and not as enrichment (Allen, 1999). Skilled labour migration is barely reflected in the media, and neither is the need of the Irish economy for these migrant workers (Mac Eínri, 2001; Mac Eínri, n.d.). In his review of the coverage of the immigration issue in The Irish Times for the year 2000, Mac Éinrí (n.d.) found that a disproportionate amount of articles dealt with asylum seekers and refugees, and totally underrepresented labour migration. This is particularly interesting because the number of labour migrants (approximately 33 000 throughout the year 2000) largely exceeds the number of asylum seekers and refugees (approximately 11 000). This attitude has been linked to an increase in racist attacks and abuse in recent years (McVeigh, & Binchy, 1998). Casey and O’Connell found that Black and Asian migrants reported having experienced racism in varied forms (e.g., access to services, pubs, finding accommodation, physical and verbal abuse). The Black migrants were the most often subject to discrimination, with up 60% reporting racist incidents; but Asians were also subject to racism, with up to 50% reporting racist incidents (Casey & O’Connell, 2000: 31). Ireland is not a “multicultural” society: only 7% of the population are not born in Ireland, and a lot of these are the children of Irish-born parents that have returned to Ireland. The term “multiculturalism” seems charged with both positive and negative affects in Ireland (Tovey & Share, 2000; Boucher, 2000).

In contrast to the general tendency of seeing migrants as a “problem” stands the need of the Irish economy for these migrants. To function effectively, the Irish Health Services depend very heavily on staff recruited from abroad. The Irish Health Board and the Nursing Board recruited a large number of nurses from overseas, mostly from the Philippines, to fill labour shortages over the last years. From 1999 to 2001 alone, 3509 Filipino/as have registered as General Nurses (An Bord Altranais Registration Department, 2001). Nurses from the Philippines make up the large majority of foreign nurses recruited to Ireland (see graph).

(An Bord Altranais, Registration statistics, www.nursingboard.ie)

Theoretical background This study is of exploratory nature. It is based on Social Identity Theory (SIT) in an attempt to explain self-protective processes found in members of socially disadvantaged groups (e.g. Tajfel & Turner, 1979). According to SIT, individual behaviour and cognition is partly determined by one’s membership to social groups. The social identity of individuals consists of those aspects of their self-image and its evaluation, which derive from membership of social groups; and much of the values attached to it derive from comparisons with other groups which are present in the social environment (Tajfel, 1978: 14). Positive social identity is based to a large extend on favorable comparisons that can be made between the ingroup and some relevant outgroup (Tajfel & Turner, 1979: 16). SIT posits that a positive social identity is necessary to build a positive self-image. The need for a positive self-esteem, a positive selfevaluation, is a central point in Tajfel’s and Turner’s early theory: ‘individuals strive to maintain or enhance their self-esteem: they strive for a positive self-concept’ (Tajfel & Turner, 1979: 40). According to Turner, the need for positive self-esteem is considered to be a fundamental human motivation, which, under conditions of heightened social identity salience, is satisfied by the relatively positive evaluation of one’s own group (Turner, Brown & Tajfel, 1979).

It is important to note that SIT does not see social identity as something fixed or determined. Social identity and its salience fluctuate with the social environment, and can be reshaped many times during a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lifetime. Because of the importance of a positive social comparison, SIT would expect members of devalued groups to have a lower level of self-esteem, because of the importance of positive comparisons. Membership to a minority ethnic group, or a socially disadvantaged group, should thus jeopardize individualsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; self-esteem. But, contrary to what was initially expected, members of devalued groups did very rarely suffer from a low self-esteem, and even sometimes showed a higher self-esteem than members of the dominant group (Crocker & Major, 1989, 1993; Jensen, White, & Galliher, 1982). The present study attempts to explain why this is so. Several possible characteristics or strategies have been proposed as being protective for self-esteem: Being a member of a collectivist culture (e.g., most Asian cultures), which is based on interdependence and relationships, can help protect selfesteem (e.g., Singelis et al., 1999; Kitayama, Markus & Lieberman, 1995; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). A high identification with oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cultural group has also shown to have protective properties (e.g., Verkuyten & Brug, 2002; Phinney, 1990). Another strategy to protect oneself against the negative effects of prejudice is to deny the existence of this prejudice (Ruggiero & Taylor, 1995, 1997). The person then refuses to accept that his or her fate is influenced by factors that are out of his or her control. By minimizing the influence of discrimination on certain outcomes in their lives, individuals can maintain a better self-esteem. This is because they can keep control over things that happen to them, and deny the pain caused by illegitimate prejudice (Ruggiero & Taylor, 1995, 1997). Asians have been found to have a high sensitivity to the opinions others hold about them. This could have a negative effect on their self-esteem (Crocker, Luhtanen, Blaine, & Broadnax, 1994). If Asians attribute negative outcomes to prejudice it might harm their self-esteem, because it means acknowledging that another group holds negative opinions about them. This might affect them to a greater extend than if they attribute negative outcomes to situational factors. Hypotheses Drawing from the above literature, we formulated three exploratory hypotheses: -

The self-esteem of participants should be affected by the use of self-protective strategies. If participants are found to use such strategies, we could expect their self-esteem to be high.

Integration in the workplace could be negatively influenced by the experience of prejudice. The level of appreciation of the quality of life in Dublin should also be affected by the experience of prejudice.

We expect participants to minimize the role of prejudice in possible discriminating situations, because of their Asian origin, and because of the self-protective effect the minimization of prejudice has shown to have. Thus, the attribution of negative outcomes to prejudice is expected to be minimized.

Method The method used in the present study is the survey by questionnaire. One preliminary interview was conducted with a Filipina nurse. Themes emerging from this interview were taken into consideration for the creation of the questionnaire. While the structured form of the questionnaire might have made it impossible to pursue some themes that would have emerged in interviews, it was thought that the confidentiality and anonymity permitted to participants were essential. In this way, they were able to 64

express themselves on potentially sensitive subjects like the experience of prejudice. A larger sample also increases the validity of results. The questionnaire is composed of questions relating to the integration of participants at work, their self-esteem, their well-being, their experience of prejudice and their appreciation of the quality of life in Dublin. Demographic information was also collected. Sample The sample was composed of 48 nurses, all female (Male participants were excluded for this paper), who are all employed in hospitals or nursing homes in County Dublin. The size of the sample is still relatively small at this time, because the study is still in process. The final study aims to reach a sample of one hundred participants. Participants were recruited at Filipino masses and through the League of Filipino nurses. They were between 24 and 49 years of age with a mean age of 32 years. They usually planned on staying in Ireland for 6 to 7 years. Only very few seemed to think of Ireland as a place of long-term settlement. 40% were married, of which 35% had children. They usually lived and worked with other Filipinos, with only one respondent living and working on her own. They generally lived with a mean of 3 to 4 other Filipinos. 60 % of the participants were involved in a Filipino association. This measure did not include informal meetings, so we can expect that activities within their own community are quite important. A large 88% was involved in a nursesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; association of some kind, like for example the Irish Nurses Oragnisation or the League of Filipino Nurses. This is a positive sign that Filipina nurses take part in professional groups, and thus make their voice heard. Results A few tendencies emerged from the first, preliminary analysis of the data. Enumerated here are just a few of potentially interesting results. One positive and expected result relates to the level of their self-esteem. Self-esteem was measured with the following items: I feel that I am a person of worth, at least on an equal basis with others. All in all, I am inclined to feel that I am a failure. I am able to do things as well as most other people. I feel I do not have much to be proud of. On the whole, I am satisfied with myself. I wish I could have more respect for myself. I certainly feel useless at times. Generally, Filipina nurses showed a high level of self-esteem (Mean score = 2.251). Because their level of self-esteem was not affected by experiences of prejudice, this positive finding could be an indicator of the presence of strong self-protective strategies (r=-.043; p = NS). Even if they had encountered prejudice on several occasions, their self-esteem remained high. Another important tendency was found in relation to prejudice. A list of hypothetical situations was proposed to the participants. They were asked if these had happened to them before, and if they thought that this kind of situation could be attributed to illegitimate prejudice.

The scale goes from 1 to 7, with 1 being the highest score for self-esteem.

7 scenarios were proposed: Suppose you go into a "fancy" restaurant. Your server seems to be taking care of all the other customers except you. You are the last person whose order is taken. Suppose you go to look at an apartment for rent. The manager of the building refuses to show it to you, saying that it has already been rented. Suppose you have to fill out some official forms on an issue that is important to you. You go to one office and they send you to another, then you go there and are sent somewhere else. No one seems to be really willing to help you. Suppose the family of a patient you have been taking care of complains about you, although you have performed your job as well as usual. Suppose promotions were given to colleagues, and you believe you should have been promoted as well, but you don’t complain. Suppose your superior tells you that you are not performing your job as well as others. Suppose you applied for a certain type of nursing that you are specialised in. You are refused and have to continue to do a job you don’t enjoy, because it is below your capacities. 30 % of the participants had encountered 3 or more of these situations. But, interestingly, the more they had experienced such situations, the less they tended to blame the outcome on prejudice (r=-.291, p < 0.05). This could show to be one of the self-protective strategies: if they refuse to attribute negative outcomes to prejudice, they also refuse to lose control over things that happen to them. Generally, people tend to feel more secure when they think they can control the events in their life to a certain extend (Crocker & Major, 1989). It might be beneficial for their self-esteem and well-being to deny the existence of discrimination. But one can’t help to think of the potentially negative consequences of this process. If victims of discrimination and prejudice deny the influence these have on outcomes in their lives, it makes the fight against discrimination even more difficult. By giving disadvantaged group members the illusion that they have control over the treatment and outcomes they receive, the advantaged group could reduce the likelihood of having to deal with claims of discrimination (Ruggiero & Taylor, 1995: 837). It would promote a denial of the existence of discrimination, and lesser performances can then be blamed on personal characteristics such as effort, and not social causes. The answers to the following three items on prejudice were rather inconclusive: I believe I have not always been treated fairly in my job since I’ve come to Ireland. Ireland is an equal opportunities society. I believe I may have been denied some opportunities because of my origin. A lot of respondents were undecided (20 % of the responses were “Undecided”). Nevertheless, a slight majority thought they may have been victims of discriminations (46 % agreed as opposed to 34 % who disagreed). We suspect that the participants’ indecision has more to do with the formulation of the questions than their actual opinions. Filipinas would not like to criticise outright, and would probably prefer a more indirect approach to express their frustrations. From annotations on the questionnaires we also got the impression that Filipinas feel defensive of Irish people. They like Irish people, and as a consequence, do not want to criticise them. Furthermore, they might be feeling like “guests” in Ireland, which would reinforce this phenomenon. The “tentative” majority acknowledging discrimination could thus point to a larger phenomenon in reality.

Another finding concerns the link between integration and satisfaction in the work environment and the general feeling of “liking to live in Dublin”. The less negative situations (see scenarios presented above) participants reported to have encountered, the more they felt comfortable in their workplace (r= -.349, p < 0.05). And the more Filipina nurses felt appreciated and accepted in their work environment, the more they, in turn, appreciated the quality of life in Dublin (r= .502, p < 0.01). Most nurses found they had good relationships with their Irish colleagues, but only very few reported participating in the informal networks, that are expressed by gossiping for example. This shows that they are integrated, but only to a certain extend, and that there is still room for the improvement of their status amongst Irish colleagues. They generally feel more or less integrated, but their answers remain insecure, and they are not absolutely positive about their integration. Conclusions Social identity theory expected members of devalued groups to have a lower self-esteem, but empirical results have shown that this is not the case. Explanations for this have been sought, and one possible strategy to protect self-esteem could be the denial of discrimination. This strategy was analysed in the present study. Generally, we can conclude that Filipina nurses are relatively well integrated and satisfied with their situation here, although one has to remember that a lot of information can be lost with questionnaire surveys like this one. The participants seemed slightly undecided on how to judge their position here, and their answers were not unanimously positive. This shows that there is still a lot of room for improvement of their situation here. Integration in the workplace was better when they had experienced less discrimination. Furthermore, integration in the workplace and satisfaction with their life here in Dublin seemed to be related. A better integration seemed to lead to a greater satisfaction with the quality of their life in Dublin. Some have experienced negative situations, but tend to minimize the role of prejudice in these situations. This could be a self-protective strategy aimed at maintaining a good self-esteem. Confirming this hypothesis, Filipina nurses tended to show a high self-esteem, even though they are living a situation of migration that can be unsettling and difficult to deal with. These preliminary results call for more profound and detailed analysis, and are here presented to give a first impression of the situation of Filipina nurses working in the Irish Health Services. References Allen, Kieran. (1999). Immigration and the Celtic Tiger: a land of a thousand welcomes? In G. Dale & Mike Cole (Eds.), The European Union and migrant labour (pp. 91-111). Berg: Oxford. An Bord Altranais Registration Department (2001). Applications from overseas nurses by division of the Nurses Register. Retrieved February, 11, 2003 from www.doh.ie/publications/nurse/app1.html Boucher, Gerard W. (2000). Irish acculturation ideologies: Mixing multiculturalism, assimilation and discrimination. In Malcolm McLachlan & Michael O’Connell (Eds.), Cultivating pluralism: Psychological, social and cultural perspectives on a changing Ireland. Dublin: Oak Tree Press. Cantos, A., & Rivera, E. (1996). Filipinos. In Juliene G. Lipson, Suzanne L. Dibble & Pamela A. Minarik (Eds.), Culture and nursing care. University of California at San Francisco, School of Nursing: UCSF Nursing Press. Casey, Sinéad, & O’Connell, Michael (2000). Pain and prejudice: Assessing the experience of racism in Ireland. In Malcolm McLachlan & Michael O’Connell (Eds.), Cultivating pluralism: 67

Psychological, social and cultural perspectives on a changing Ireland. Dublin: Oak Tree Press. Church, A. Timothy (1987). Personality research in a non-western culture: The Philippines. Psychological Bulletin, 102(1), 272-292. Crocker, Jennifer, & Major, Brenda (1989). Social stigma and self-esteem: The self-protective properties of stigma. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(4), 608-630. Crocker, Jennifer, & Major, Brenda (1993). Reactions to stigma: The moderating role of justifications. In Mark P. Zanna & James M. Olson (Eds.), The psychology of prejudice: The Ontario Symposium (Vol 7, pp.289-314). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Crocker, Jennifer, Luhtanen, Riia, Blaine, Bruce, & Broadnax, Stephanie (1994). Collective selfesteem and psychological well-being among white, Black and Asian college students. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20(5), 503-513. Giger, Joyce Newman, & Davidhizar, Ruth Elaine (1999) (Eds.) Transcultural nursing: Assessment and intervention. St. Louis, MI: Mosby. Gil, Andres G., & Vega, William A. (1996). Two different worlds: Acculturation stress and adaptation among Cuban and Nicaraguan families. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 13(3), 22-23. Guthrie, George McRuer, & Jacobs, Pepita Jimenez (1966). Child rearing and personality development in the Philippines. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Intelligo Software and Payroll (n.d.) Filipino nurses subject to racial harassment in Irish hospitals. Newsletter, HR News Stories. Retrieved February, 11, 2003 from www.intelligo.ie Irish Examiner, 21/10/2000. Nightmare as Filipino nurses pay heavily and find themselves duped. (Electronic Version) Jensen, Gary F., White, C. S., & Galliher, James M. (1982). Ethnic status and adolescent selfevaluations: An extension of research on minority self-esteem. Social Problems, 30(2), 226239. Kitayama, Shinobu, Markus, Hazel Rose, & Lieberman, Cary (1995). The collective construction of self-esteem: Implications for culture, self, and emotion. In James A. Russell, José-Miguel Fernandez-Dols, Antony S. R. Manstead & J. C. Wellencamp (Eds.), Everyday conceptions of emotions: An introduction to the psychology, anthropology, and linguistics of emotion (pp. 523-550). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer. Markus, Hazel Rose, & Kitayama, Shinobu (1991). Culture and self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological review, 98(2), 224-253. Mac Éinrí, Piaras (2001). Immigration into Ireland: trends, policy responses, outlook. Retrieved October, 22, 2002 from http://migration.ucc.ie/irelandfirstreport.htm Mac Éinrí, Piaras (n.d.). Immigration and the Irish media: one year of coverage in the Irish Times (summary of longer article). Retrieved February, 11, 2003 from http://migration.ucc.ie/section2.htm Malone, Siobhan (2002). The migration experience of Filipina nurses. Unpublished thesis. MPhil. in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Trinity College Dublin. McVeigh, Robbie, & Binchy, Alice (1998). Travellers, refugees, and racism in Tallaght. Dublin: West Tallaght Resource Centre. Nesdale, Drew; Rooney, Rosanna, & Smith, Leigh (1997). Migrant ethnic identity and psychological distress. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 28(5), 569-588. Pak, Anita Wang-Ping, Dion, Kenneth L., & Dion, Karen K. (1991). Social psychological correlates of experienced discrimination: Test of the double jeopardy hypothesis. Journal of Intercultural Relations, 15(2), 243-254. Phinney, Jean (1990). Ethnic identity in adolescents and adults: Review of research. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 499-514. Ruggiero, Karen, & Taylor, Donald (1995). Coping with discrimination: How disadvantaged group members perceive the discrimination that confronts them. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(5), 826-838.

Ruggiero, Karen, & Taylor, Donald (1997). Why minority group members perceive or do not perceive the discrimination that confronts them: The role of self-esteem and perceived control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(2), 373-389. Singelis, Theodore; Bond, Michael; Sharkey, William, & Lai, Chris Siu Yui (1999). Unpackaging cultureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s influence on self-esteem and embarassability. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 30, (3), 315-341. Tajfel, Henri (1978). The social psychology of minorities. (Report No. 38). London: The Minority Rights Group Tajfel, Henri, & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup relations. In Stephen Worchel & William G. Austin (Eds.), The psychology of intergroup relations (pp.33-47). Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole. Tovey, Hilary & Share, Perry (2000). A sociology of Ireland. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Turner, J.C., Brown, R. J., & Tajfel, Henri (1979). Social comparison and group interest in ingroup favoritism. European Journal of Social Psychology, 9(2), 187-204. Verkuyten, Maykel, & Brug, Peary (2002). Ethnic identity achievement, self-esteem, and discrimination among Surinamese adolescents in the Netherlands. Journal of Black Psychology, 28(2), 122-144.

(En)gendering Ireland’s migratory space Ronit Lentin Photographs: Estibaliz Errazquin Introduction

I am extremely upset about the judgment and I have not slept for three nights. It is a big shock for us because we are beginning to settle in and live a life of peace and of self dignity here… I have lost my self dignity, even to walk on the road now I am so embarrassed, I think everyone is looking at me and I feel very inferior (Yeti, a Nigerian mother of 10-months Irish-born twins, cited in Deegan, 2003:2). In January 2003 the Supreme Court rejected the appeal by Czech Roma and Nigerian asylum seekers facing deportation, claiming that because they had children born in the State they were entitled to residency status. Since the 1990 Supreme Court ruling in the Fajujonu case, in which illegal immigrants from Nigeria and Morocco were allowed to remain in Ireland because their Irish child had the right to the ‘care, company and parentage’ of her parents within the family unit, 4,027 non-EU citizens have been granted residency in Ireland as parents of children born in Ireland. Immigrant support groups fear that 10,000 people waiting for a decision in their applications for residency would be deported. The reactions to the judgment centred firstly, on the contradictions between the Constitutional commitment to the integrity of ‘the family’ and the entitlement of people born on the island of Ireland to membership of ‘the nation’ (configured separately from citizenship rights), and secondly, between the right of the minister to deport and the right of Irish citizens to the care and company of their families. This paper engenders the discussion, positioning at its centre migrant women, the reproducers of future Irish generations, as active agents. Psychological distancing was the first stage of annihilation, as Zygmunt Bauman argues in relation to the Holocaust. Side by side with multiculturalist policies, the gradual response of the Irish 70

state to the increase in asylum applications is first, psychological distancing (calling asylum seekers ‘bogus refugees’ ‘illegal immigrants’, and/or ‘economic migrants’ and thus discrediting them), second, physical distancing (dispersing asylum seekers to direct provision hostels), and finally deportation. The aim seems to remove Ireland’s new strangers first from consciousness and then from sight, by, among other tactics, removing asylum seekers beyond the boundaries of morality, as did the Minister for Justice when he suggested that ‘the interests of morality would be better served’ if a substantial amount of the €300 million spent annually by the State on asylum seekers would go to overseas development’ (The Irish Times, 2003: 7), and finally announcing, in February 2003, that ‘immigrant parents of children born in Ireland are no longer entitled to seek residency in the State due to their parental status’ (Haughey, 2003b: 3). Theorising Ireland as a ‘racial state’ seeking to order the disorder of late modernity, this paper posits the gendering of Ireland’s new migratory spaces via the bodies of ‘non national’ mothers. I draw on David Goldberg’s concept of the two traditions of thinking about racial states, naturalism and historicism, in order to interrogate the deeply gendered character of the racial state. Secondly, positing Dublin as the feminised space of strangers, as in Joyce’s ‘Anna Livia’, I – a migrant woman myself – examine the role of socio(logical) researchers as both ‘strangers’ and ‘strollers’ (Benjamin, 1968; Bauman, 1998) researching migrant women as ‘strangers’ with (baby) strollers. Just as migrant mothers and their ‘Irish born’ children are dragging Irish modernity kicking and screaming into the chaos of the postmodern, stranger-stroller researchers can destabilise ordered socio(logical) narratives about the other (En)gendering the ‘racial state’ Goldberg posits modern nation-states as ‘racial states’, which exclude in order to construct homogeneity – which he calls ‘heterogeneity in denial’ – while appropriating difference through celebrations of the multicultural.. The racial state is a state of power, asserting its control over those within the state and excluding others from outside the state. Through constitutions, border controls, the law, policy making, bureaucracy and governmental technologies like census categorisations, invented histories and traditions, ceremonies and cultural imaginings, the modern state is defined by its power to exclude (and include) in racially ordered terms, to categorise hierarchically, and to set aside. In the modern state, race and nation are defined in terms of each other to produce a coherent picture of the population. Goldberg posits two traditions of thinking about racial states. The first, naturalism, fixes racially conceived ‘natives’ as naturally incapable of progress, as illustrated by 17th century English colonialism racialising the Irish (Lloyd, 1999 1). The second, historicism, elevates Europeans over ‘primitive’ or underdeveloped Others as a victory of progress. While woman – the gendered other of modernity – is deleted from state protection and right (though not from state regulation), the modern state is about keeping racialised others out. Understood as the space of white men of property, 2 the modern state’s historicist progressivism aims, through assimilation, to assist its racial Others to ‘undo their uncivilised conditions’. But beneath its liberalism, historicism camouflages racism, and is ultimately about the ordering zeal of modernity. Conceived in naturalistic terms, those classified as not white are placed outside modern time and space. Classifying schemas are about imposing order and control in the face of the unknown, and are central to the experience of racism. But modernity’s struggle to order the world gave rise to chaos, and modernity’s ambivalence responds to disorder by repressive state insistence on the order it imposes through law, policy, classificatory modes and immigration controls. The revision of the categories through which the racial order claims to be known –an example is citizenship laws – spells a shift from

See Innes, 1993, on the feminisation of the Irish by the British. As was argued by Chief Justice Taney in relation to the intentional exclusion of black people from being considered citizens under the US Constitution, Goldberg, 2002: 76; see also Mann, 1997; and Lentin, 1998, on the racial nature of the Constitution of Ireland. 2

‘being’ to ‘becoming’, through racial management technologies such as education, equal opportunities and access. If the Irish were naturalised by the British and the Irish state was constitutionally conceived as the space of white, settled men of property, it now racialises its own (non-white) ‘inferiors’, through governmental technologies of asylum and immigration control, aiming to restore modernity’s order just as all certainties are collapsing. But control is also achieved through equality mechanisms, which reproduce the racially inferior as ultimately unequal, since the promise of equality is always conditional (c.f. Malik, 1998; Cohen, 1988). Catharine McKinnon argues that liberal theory’s view that the law is society’s text hides the state’s gendered definition from view. Gender is indeed a crucial factor in racial state formation, which frowns on mixed race miscegenation, for fear of degeneracy and pollution. As ‘ethnic subjects’ and the reproducers of future generations, women are racially marked and controlled differently from men, despite universal claims to gender equality. Because racial states are never complete, they need to reaffirm themselves through population control technologies, usually imposed on women’s bodies, prescribing which women are entitled to give birth to the citizens of ‘the nation’. In order to study asylum seeking women in Ireland we must begin from our own ‘whiteness’, and look at the racialisation of gendered boundaries, the re-spatialisation of the city’s ethnic landscape in view of contemporary transformations, the gendering of citizenship, but also the agency of women asylum seekers. In James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake it is a woman, Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is not only at home in the city of Dublin, she is the city of Dublin. She is the river Liffey, running through Dublin, but she is all the rivers of the world. In the figure of Anna Livia, Dublin is feminised: her mamafesta – Joyce’s female word for manifesto, also denoting motherhood, and festivals – as ‘woman of the world who can tell naked truths’ – marks the city boundaries that estrange and feminise the stranger. To theorise the Dublin city space as ‘soft’, porous, and permeable to migratory movements, and arguably ‘feminised’, and the gendering of its migratory spaces, specific city spaces can be targeted. Because of women’s strategic position in relation to Ireland’s citizenship and residency laws, the maternity hospital, more than any other city space, becomes a site of corporeality where women, through giving birth, have until the Supreme Court ruling, acquired residency rights for themselves and their partners. 3 Dublin, Joyce’s Dublin-Anna Livia, feminine, yet ‘bewitching, ever-changing, animating, allpervading’ – can be theorised as a series of acts of resistance and survival rather than of mere strangerhood. Nowhere does Joyce state that Anna Livia is ‘really Irish’, but rather that she is the ‘bringer of plurabilities’ – the harbinger of pluralism, or, more simply, the producer of numerous offspring. Her asylum seeker daughters, whose narratives of voyage denote survival and resistance against many odds, are unlikely to be allowed to become part of the fabric of the city, unless, that is, they mother Irish-born children and thus either become, like Anna Livia, ‘bringers of plurabilities’, or, in light of the new residency ruling for parents of ‘Irish born’ children following the Supreme Court ruling, candidates for deportation.

However, none of the asylum seeker mothers Kennedy and Murphy-Lawless (2001) interviewed had access to a bath in refugee hostels, although they may bleed for six weeks, and they had to use toilet facilities with other residents of shared refugee hostel rooms.

Conclusion: Strangers and strollers Social researchers, like city strollers, finding themselves among strangers and being strangers to them, often take strangers as ‘surfaces’, ‘so that “what one sees” exhausts “what they are”, seeing and knowing them episodically (Bauman, 1998: 92). In the ‘universal otherhood’ of city life, strollerresearchers often take ‘snapshots’, which become a substitute for seeing (Fromm, 1974: 343). Snapshots, the ‘momentary link between the shooter and the hit’, are unconnected pleasurable fragments of the stroller, that pioneer onlooker, the first practitioner of looking without seeing (Bauman, 1998: 133). Bauman argues that assimilation and expulsion are the two strategies of managing strangers, those ubiquitous, interstitial, but ultimately irremovable ‘others’ of modernity. These strategies, however, are not ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of strangers, but rather ways of controlling the problem, and no administration of social spaces eliminates racism and xenophobia. There is a third possibility, that of constructing new diasporic spaces in the racial city, 4 yet Bauman’s (1998: 138) Janus-faced stranger is both stroller, mysterious and inviting, and the face of infinite opportunity, and stranger proper, sinister and menacing, but also half-visible and blurred. As a migrant woman myself, I would critique sociological narratives –constructed by white scholars, whose whiteness is rarely explicit – which often theorise the other unreflexively. Constructing logical narratives about the other, we tend to ignore the exhortation (Spivak, 1988) to let the ‘subaltern’ speak, and the suggestion that as feminist sociologists we must make our whiteness and our privilege explicit in the research process, particularly while constructing the ‘other’ (Byrne and Lentin, 2000). As stranger ‘non national’ mothers with baby-strollers become an everyday occurrence on Irish streets, socio(logial) studies of the immigrant other mushroom. At the same time, critiques of unproblematised research design about the other are beginning to emerge. Feldman et al (2002) asked asylum seekers whether they viewed research and development projects they were involved in as beneficial for their communities. Respondents said that their interests were not represented, that terms such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’ were empty rhetoric, that they were used, and that they rarely received feedback: ‘some of them (researchers) are like… mushrooms after rain… They appear and disappear and who is going to benefit from them?’ To date, few Irish studies have privileged feminist research strategies or collaborative methodologies in relation to migrant women’s personal narratives, ideally elicited in collaboration

In the Irish context see, White, 2001, 2002; Ugba, 2002; De Tona, 2002; Lentin, 2002b.

with native/stranger informants, so as to avoid the ‘snapshot’ qualities of much social research on Dublin’s new migrant communities. Katrina Goldstone (2000) cautions against representing the other in simplified and reductionist terms, and argues that academic research and writing can be used ‘as a means of legitimising continued oppression or condoning past injustices’. She exhorts researchers to question their motives when setting out to research racialised ethnic groups and says that ‘the colonisation of the images and experiences of… any group outside the golden circle of Western Eurocentrism contributes to continued subjugation’ (see also McDonagh, 2000 for a critique of mainstream studies of ethnic minority women). According to Goldberg, ‘the state may licence and promote racial and gendered identities like “white” or “male”… yet racial or gendered subjects obviously may express their identities… in ways transgressive to state licence’. Although the debate on the ‘Irish born children’ has hitherto silenced the voices of those most directly affected – asylum seeker mothers giving birth to Irish citizens – voices of resistance are beginning to be heard. One such voice is Yeti’s, the Nigerian mother of Irish born baby twins I quoted earlier. Responding to the court ruling, she said: ‘I am sad and pained and I feel very black. No matter where we go we will always be second-class citizens and this judgment made a lot of people petrified in our community’ (Deegan, 2003: 2). Although silenced by governmental technologies and multiculturalist initiatives, which often consult the racialised other only formally, asylum seeker and other migrant women are increasingly seeking to speak for themselves. A submission to the National Plan Against Racism by AkiDwA and the Women’s Group, Islamic Cultural Centre in Ireland (2002) stressed their wish to speak for themselves and not have others – either men from their own communities, or members of the majority Irish community, be they NGOs or government bodies – speak for them. (The submission argued that state and NGO initiatives tended to ignore) not only the effects of Apartheid and colonialism, but also women’s specific experiences of racism, which this submission aims to record and have acknowledged. State responses to the challenges and threats of miscegenation and impurity posed by asylum seeker mothers and their ‘Irish born’ children are a determined attempt to control humans in the Irish racial state and perpetuate homogeneity in the face of heterogeneity and ambivalence.

Asylum seeking mothers, with their baby strollers, are a visible reminder that the certainties of the racial state are being subverted through everyday interactions with service providers, but also everyday encounters, on buses, in clinics, in shops, on the street, dragging Irish modernity, kicking and screaming, into the multicultural, the postmodern, the uncertain. Choosing Ireland as their children’s birthplace, and opting to speak for themselves, not via socio(logical) narratives, asylum seeking mothers are arguably destabilising Ireland’s racial homogeneities, and Irish understandings of ‘the nation’, ‘the family’, and ‘the citizenry’. This is an 74

important juncture in contemporary Irish history, which provides stranger-stroller researchers with an opportunity to subvert ordered socio(logical) narratives about the other, making our ‘snapshots’ somewhat less blurred.

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Mann, Michael. 1997. ‘The flip-side of democracy: In what circumstances has popular sovereignty legitimated murder?’ Paper presented at the Seventh Annual Conference of the Association of the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, London School of Economics and Political Science. McDonagh, Rosaleen. 2000. ‘Talking back’, in Anne Byrne and Ronit Lentin (eds.) (Re)searching Women: Feminist Research Methodologies in the Social Sciences in Ireland. Dublin: Institute for Public Administration. McKinnon, Catharine. 1989. Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Charkravorty. 1988. ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, London: Macmillan. The Irish Times. 2003. ‘Asylum system must be respected – McDowell’. The Irish Times, 5 February 2003: 7. Ugba, Abel. 2002. ‘Meeting the needs of a community: The role of socio-cultural institutions in the African community in Dublin’. Paper presented in Re-mapping Dublin: Spatial narratives of ethnic minorities and diasporic communities in a changing city seminar, Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin, 16 February. Ugba, Abel. 2003. ‘African communities in 21st Century Dublin: Enclaves of solidarity or ghettos of exclusion?’ Paper presented to the seminar series, Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin, 14 February 2003. White, Elisa Joy. 2001. ‘Making space in a time warp: African diaspora culture and identity in a retroglobal Ireland’, Paper presented to the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies and the Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin, 16 February. White, Elisa Joy. 2002. ‘On Dublin’s African diaspora spaces’. Paper presented in Re-mapping Dublin: Spatial narratives of ethnic minorities and diasporic communities in a changing city seminar, Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin.

Globalization and sexuality: Redrawing racial and national boundaries through discourses of childbearing Eithne Luibhéid Department of Ethnic Studies Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA Email eithne@bgnet.bgsu.edu Tel. (419) 372-7120

There has been a great deal of scholarship about how governments recreate an image of nation, or “renationalize the nation,” in today’s global context—a context that has significantly altered our usual ideas of nation.5 There is less discussion about how women’s bodies are central to these processes of renationalization. What I’m going to argue is that imagery and language about asylum seeking women’s childbearing has provided the Irish government with a means to re-nationalize the nation at this moment—and at the same time to both draw on existing racial boundaries and create new ones. My argument treats both nation and race as constructs that continually change, rather than as stable over time, and I also argue that the precise direction of change is never fully determined in advance. I want to start with the issue of race. Discourses about asylum seekers—and by discourses I mean imagery, language, policies, and institutional arrangements—draw on existing racial boundaries, and also allow us to create new ones. To understand how this happens, it’s helpful to historicize race—especially how race takes gendered forms, and needs women’s bodies in order to operate. Concepts of race have very tangled roots. In the late eighteenth century, science played a key role in constructing notions of race as a form of difference based in biology and manifested through visible physical characteristics. That idea survives now through popular ideas about skin color, hair, lips, eyes, and other features as markers of racial “difference.”6 This is despite the fact that scientists have been unable to find any genetic or biological basis for the divisions that we call “race.” Race, then, is pre-eminently a social construction.7 The fact that race is social and not biological, is evident when we think about the fact that different countries have different ways for categorizing people into races, and that these categorization systems change over time. In the nineteenth century, ideas about gender were among the important social factors that shaped how racial categories were constructed. For example, “superior” racial groups supposedly had greater gender distinctions within their societies than “inferior” groups, and racial theorists argued that this could be objectively shown by measuring skull sizes and brain capacities. Moreover, the social status of women within particular groups became treated as “evidence” of that group’s racial status—an idea that is alive and well today. Women’s bodies, especially African women’s bodies, were increasingly used as the means to study racial difference itself. One of the most (in) famous examples of the use of African women’s bodies to establish racial hierarchies involved Saartje or Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, who was exhibited in England and France between 1810-1815. She was exhibited particularly so that Europeans could look at her buttocks and genitalia, which, according to scientists, were proof that racial differences did exist and moreover, races weren’t equal but ranked hierarchically, with 5

E.g. Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) 6 At the height of nineteenth century scientific racism, physical features such as the angle of the jaw, shape of the head, spinal curvature, etc., were also taken to be racial marks. 7 Bodies are different—but which differences get cited as racial varies by time and space. Moreover, we have to be trained in which differences supposedly count as racial, and in how to read these differences. See Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

Africans at the lowest end.8 The circulation in popular media (including newspapers, cartoons, and vaudeville) and in scientific writing of images and ideas about Bartmann’s body, helped to reconsolidate racial hierarchies in new ways. Bartmann’s unhappy experiences make clear that racial meanings and boundaries are not static, but continually redrawn, and that women’s bodies are often central to these processes. According to Bill Rolston and Michael Shannon, Irish audiences were among those who saw Bartmann when she was exhibited.9 Historically, Irish women have been forced to become very familiar with the connections among gender and race. In the nineteenth century, while Ireland remained under British rule, the Celt became located in an intermediate position within the racial hierarchies of the time. As often occurs in racialization processes, this location was justified by supposedly objective physical traits. For example, Dr. John Beddoe’s “index of nigrescence” claimed to prove that Celts became increasingly Africanized as one moved from east to west in the British Isles, with inhabitants of Western Ireland registering an index of 70% African.10 Such allegedly objective physical differences were believed to mean, in turn, that differences between the Celt/Irish and Saxon/English were not socially based, but rather, biologically based.11 The extent to which women’s bodies were used to articulate a Celtic/Saxon distinction remains to be established. However, Dr. Richard Tuthill Massy, a Lecturer at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, published Analytical Ethnology in 1855, in which he tried to challenge AngloSaxon racialism through inversion. In other words, like the scientific racists of the day, he used physical criteria as grounds for discussing race, but tried to argue that these criteria were proof of Celtic superiority. Moreover, he used women’s bodies, and arguments about the allegedly greater beauty of Celtic women, to try to make his point, offering such claims as “with the large calf of the Celtic woman you have a small breast; with the large thigh of the Saxon woman you have a large breast.”12 Alleged racial differences between Celt and Saxon, supposedly grounded in biology, were also believed to give rise to specific cultural traits. Bronwyn Walter argues that imagery about these cultural traits was very gendered. The bodies of manual laborer men most frequently represented ideas of Irishness, and these men constructed as stupid, uneducated, dirty, violent, and drunken. Irish women were also the backbone of many low-wage occupations in Great Britain, but it was not through their paid labor but through their childbearing that they were racialized: “Irish women’s bodies were implicitly present in stereotyping through their role in the process of reproduction, especially their ‘excessive’ fertility. … The rhetoric focuses on families and their threat to the English way of life both biologically and culturally. These include through ‘swamping’ and racial degeneration, the weakening of Protestantism, unfair demand for resources and lack of control over bodies, both their own and those of unruly, dirty, and over-numerous children.”13 After independence, Irish women in the South were annexed to the cause and representation of the nation-state in remarkably similar terms, although their childbearing was now celebrated. Postcolonial Irish nationalism, which functioned partly as a reverse discourse that elevated the 8

When Bartmann died in France at the age of approximately 28, the famous Georges Cuvier got to conduct the postmortem. His 16-page report devoted 9 full pages to her genitalia, and only one paragraph to her brain. A wax mold of her genitalia was made and kept at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris. In terms of the so-called scientific writing about Bartmann, the significant point is not that it was “inaccurate” according to some standard of objective science. Rather, the writing was highly productive, in a Foucauldian sense. It constructed, circulated, and legitimated a set of ideas whose consequences we are still living. See Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation. The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815-1817,” in Feminism and the Body, ed. Londa Schiebinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 203-233. 9 Bill Rolston and Michael Shannon, Encounters. How Racism Came to Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 2002), 4. 10 L.P Curtis, Apes and Angels: the Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), pp.19-20 11 Curtis, p.95. See also Matthew Arnold’s ethnological claims regarding Celts in his The Study of Celtic Literature (Port Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press, 1970 [1905]). 12 See Curtis, p.16. 13 Bronwyn Walter, Outsiders Inside. Whiteness, Place and Irish Women (London, Routledge, 2000), 91.

formerly colonized people, retained the notion of Irishness as racial, 14 and the idea that this racial substance was significantly transmitted through childbearing and rearing. As has been well documented, the 1937 constitution reflected these ideas. Yet, in relegating women to the role of childbearer and childrearer for the nation, a particular vision and version of nation, and of Irishness as race, was enshrined. The vision and version conceived Irish women as settled, Catholic, and “white.” Thus, childbearing by “immigrant, Black Irish, Jewish, Traveller, & Muslim women, among others,” was not envisioned as perpetuating the Irish nation, understood in racial terms. 15 In sum, childbearing has to be analyzed not only in terms of gendered representations and social relations, but also in terms of racial representations and social relations, as these relate to nation-building.16 The controversies over asylum seeker women’s childbearing offer an opportunity to make such an analysis in the present moment.

Asylum seekers in the Celtic Tiger To understand how and why asylum seeker women’s childbearing has emerged as a controversial issue, some historical and contextual information is necessary. According to M.A.G. O’Tuathaigh, emigration was “the single most important fact of Irish social history for more than two centuries,” but that changed abruptly in the 1990s. 17 The government’s strategy for national development, which harnessed the Republic’s economy to global capitalism since the 1950s, unexpectedly generated substantial growth rates in the mid- to late-90s, to such a degree that the U.S. investment firm Morgan Stanley dubbed Ireland “the Celtic Tiger.” To an unprecedented degree, Irish employers began having to recruit workers from abroad, and within a relatively short time, both lowwage service sector jobs and certain high-skilled and professional jobs were being staffed by immigrants. Moreover, selected Irish emigrants were recruited to return by FÁS, Ireland’s training 14

On notions of Irishness as racial, see not only the scholarship on the Celt/Saxon dichotomy, but also the section called “Of the Gaelic Psyche” in ed. William G. Fitz-Gerald, The Voice of Ireland. A Survey of the Race and Nation From All Angles (John Heywood Ltd.: Dublin, Manchester, London and Blackburn, 1928), 69-98. See also the writings of W.B. Yeats, especially “Genealogical Tree of the Revolution” and “A Race Philosophy,” reprinted in A. Norman Jeffares, W.B. Yeats: Man and Poet (London: Routledge Kegan Paaul, 1949), pp.351-2. See also critical exegesis of these writings, including David Bradshaw, “The Eugenics Movement in the 1930s and the Emergence of ‘On The Boiler,’” Yeats Annual 9 (1992):189-215; Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations. Gender, Class and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John S. Kelly, “The Fifth Bell: Race and Class in Yeats’s Political Thought,” in ed. Okifumi Komesu and Masaru Sekine, Irish Writers and Politics (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989), 109-175; Paul Scott Stansfield, “Yeats and Eugenics” in his Yeats and Politics in the 1930s (New York: St. Martins, 1989). For recent writings on Irishness and race, see Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh, Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 2002). 15 Shalini Sinha, “The Right to Irishness: Implications of Ethnicity, Nation and State Towards a Truly MultiCultural Ireland,” in ed. Ronit Lentin, The Expanding Nation: Towards a Multi-Ethnic Ireland (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, 1998), 24. Sinha’s argument is that “[Ailbhe] Smyth has argued that Irish women have changed the national identity simply because their actions contradict its construction (1995). However, it is important to note that [certain] women are already included within the membership of that identity, and thus the contradiction of their actions has some influence upon it. That is, they are not excluded from Irishness, although they are oppressed by its construction. Meanwhile, immigrants, Black Irish, Jewish, Traveller, and Muslim people, among others, are not considered Irish. Thus for them to shift Irishness may be more precarious” (24). 16 Ronit Lentin has also advanced the argument that Irishness is not only gendered but also racialized and antiSemitic. She therefore challenges the tendency in much scholarship to treat Irish women as a homogenous group, and calls for analyses that address women’s experience in relation to class, racial, ethnic, and religious differentiation. My analysis of childbearing attempts to do that. See Lentin, “Racializing (Our) Dark Rosaleen: Feminism, Citizenship, Racism, Antisemitism,” in Women’s Studies Review 6 (1999): 1-17. 17 M.A.G. O’Tuathaigh, “The Historical Pattern of Irish Emigration: Some Labour Aspects,” in ed. Galway Labour History Group, The Emigrant Experience (Galway: Galway Labour History Group, 1991), 9.

and employment agency, through job fairs held in countries such as the US, UK, France, Germany, and South Africa.18 At the same time, individuals claiming to seek political asylum from persecution began to arrive.19 In 1996, the number of asylum seekers surpassed 1,000 for the first time; in 2002, the peak year so far, 11,530 people applied for asylum. 20 Nigerians have consistently been the largest group of asylum seekers, followed by Romanians, then people of other nationalities. 21 The asylum seeker issue is especially valuable for considering how nation-building is operating and being reconstructed in this global world. Asylum seekers’ arrival can be directly linked to forms of global restructuring and global capital accumulation that are altering nation-states, displacing millions, and resulting in escalating numbers of refugee/asylum seekers worldwide, and at the same time generating prosperity for EU nations including Ireland.22 They arrive without permission, thus troubling the foundation of the nation state that depends on control of its borders to remain sovereign.23 But unlike unauthorized immigrants, they cannot simply be expelled, because by requesting asylum, they invoke international human rights standards that no nation can afford to ignore without risking political and economic sanctions. Responses to asylum seekers, however, occur largely in national contexts and offer opportunities to “renationalize the nation” in ways that demand analysis. 24 Thus, asylum seekers not only threaten the nation-state, but also provide occasions for new strategies of governance and identification that reconstitute the significance of the nation-state precisely when globalization seems to threaten it. 25 The Irish government’s response, framed within an implicitly nationalist logic, has constructed the arrival of asylum seekers as a threat to national sovereignty and economic development. Although asylum seekers cannot be summarily expelled, the Irish government has implemented strategies to discourage their arrival in the first place.26 Those that do arrive are placed in the Direct Provision system, where they live as if in limbo, with food, housing and medical care available, but without opportunities to work, be educated or integrate. A majority of their claims are eventually rejected, at which time they can be expelled without raising many eyebrows. 27 18

According to the Central Statistics Office, “Population and Migration Estimates,” published in April 2001, between 1996-2001, some 263,000 immigrants (including “returned emigrants”) entered the Republic. While the numbers are small by US standards, by Irish standards, they were equivalent to 7% of the 1996 population, which stood at 3.6 million, and thus, had a very significant impact. See Piaras Mac Éinrí, “Immigration into Ireland: Trends, Policy Responses, Outlook,” at the Irish Centre for Migration Studies website, http://migration.ucc.ie/ 19 For an overview, see Mac Éinrí. 20 These numbers are provisional. See Nuala Haughey, “Plans to Increase Efficiency in Asylum Processing,” 2 January 2003, Irish Times. 21 According to Annual Report 2001 (Dublin: Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner, 2002), there were 39,591 applications for asylum between 1992 and 2001 in the Republic. 22 Elizabeth Ferris, Beyond Borders: Refugees, Migrants, and Human Rights in the Post-Cold War Era (Geneva: WCC, 1993); Liisa Malkki, “Refugees and Exiles: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495-523; Peter Nobel ed. Refugees and Displacement in Africa (Uppsala, Sweden: Scandanavia Institute of African Studies, 1987). 23 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 24 Sassen, Losing Control? 25 Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 26 For example, measures were taken to prevent them boarding ferries at Cherbourg, France, that were bound for Rosslare, Ireland, where they would then apply for asylum. 27 Measures to speed up the expulsion of asylum seekers included repatriation agreements with Nigeria and Bulgaria; fast track procedures for dismissing claims deemed “manifestly unfounded”; immigration bills that focused mainly on deportation and on criminalizing traffickers; and dawn raids in summer 2002. See also Irish Refugee Council, Asylum in Ireland. A Report on the Fairness and Sustainability of Asylum Decisions in the First Instance (Dublin: Irish Refugee Council, 2000), and Irish Refugee Council, Manifestly Unjust: A Report on the Fairness and Sustainability of Accelerated Procedures for Asylum Determinations (Dublin: Irish Refugee Council, 2001). Available at http://www.irishrefugeecouncil.ie/pub.html

While restrictive treatment of asylum seekers emerged as the order of the day, one "loophole” remained. The loophole involved having a baby on Irish soil, which generally conferred on parents the right to remain within the Irish territory. This right stemmed from two sources. First, the 1990 Supreme Court decision in Fajujonu allowed the parents of Irish-born children to remain in Ireland, even though they were not citizens. The decision hinged not on the parents’ rights or needs, but on the child’s right to the company, care and nurture of her or his parents. 28 Second, the Good Friday Agreements of 1998 made every child born in Ireland, whether in the North or the Republic, an Irish citizen. Based on this combination of circumstances, having a baby in Ireland emerged as one of the few avenues through which people could be reasonably sure that they would have an opportunity to remain. 29 However, that avenue began to close down in 2002, when the Minister for Justice issued deportation orders against the Lobe family from the Czech Republic and Mr. Andrew Osayande from Nigeria, even though they had Irish born children. The deportations were appealed in the High Court in March 2002, where Mr. Justice Smyth, in a ruling that significantly reworked the terms of the Fajujonu decision, decided that the Minister could deport these parents, even if this resulted in Irish citizen children bring removed from the State. The families appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, where the case was heard in October 2002. The Supreme Court ruling, issued on January 23, 2003, affirmed the High Court decision. The fact that until 2003, childbearing was a more reliable means than filing for asylum to gain residency in Ireland, meant that childbearing by foreigners, especially asylum seekers, has emerged as very controversial among the public and the government. Therefore, the next section discusses how asylum seeker women’s childbearing became represented, and the kinds of social relations that were facilitated as a result. Childbearing Against the State Since the late 1990s, asylum seekers’ childbearing (and implicitly, their sex lives) has been forcibly on display, made available for commentary, in ways that must be extraordinarily demeaning and painful. The forced public-ness of asylum seekers’ sex lives derives precisely from their status as asylum seekers, which means that they must subject their lives to scrutiny or risk denial of their asylum claims. 30As a result, it became possible to read regularly in the newspaper about specific asylum seekers who are pregnant, how asylum seekers sought fertility treatment, that some asylum seekers sought abortions in the UK, at what stage in pregnancy asylum seeker women tended to seek pre natal care, and so on.31 28

The Supreme Court decision is found at [1990] 2 IR 151. For discussion, see Tanya Ward, “The Legal Condition of Refugees in Ireland,” at the Irish Centre for Migration Studies website http://migration.ucc.ie/. See also, Amnesty International, Asylum Law and Policy in Ireland. A Critical Guide (Dublin: Amnesty International, 2000). 29 According to the Irish Times, in 2001, 2,474 people were given leave to remain in Ireland based on having an Irish born child. During a slightly longer time period, 20 November 2000 through 31 December 2001, according to the Refugee Applications Commissioner, 467 people were granted leave to remain in Ireland based on asylum claims they had filed (Annual Report 2001, 68). The Irish Times reports that between 1996 and 2001, 4,859 people were granted leave to remain in Ireland based on having an Irish born child (9 Jan 2001). What emerges here is that more people have received leave to remain in Ireland based on having a child, than based on their asylum application being deemed credible. Yet, there is quite a bit of controversy over the standards and procedures that are used to adjudicate asylum applications, and questions about whether the low rate of acceptance fairly represents the validity of claims—or the restrictiveness of the Irish government. See for example Irish Refugee Council, Asylum in Ireland. In terms of the rate of acceptance, Paul Cullen reports that between 1 Jan 2002 and 16 October 2002, 8,412 applications for asylum were filed. Of applications processed in that time period, 5,961 (or 89%) were denied and 708 (or 11%) were granted. See Cullen, “Figures Show Increase in Numbers Deported,” Irish Times, 16 October 2002. 30 As Foucault indicates in Discipline and Punish, it is the lives of subordinate people that are increasingly subject to scrutiny within contemporary regimes of power. 31 Also, there was a suggestion to differentiate the treatment of those who arrived already pregnant, from those who arrived and then became pregnant while waiting for their claim to be adjudicated. This problematic

Although asylum seekers’ childbearing has been on public display in this way, asylum seekers are rarely in a position to represent themselves or explain what their childbearing means. Rather, dominant media and the government became the ones who primarily constructed images of asylum seekers’ childbearing and its significance—although their constructions were not unilaterally accepted. Dominant images centered on the figure of the pregnant asylum seeker as a person of concern to the state. The pregnant asylum seeker, through birthing a live child on Irish soil, could by-pass the immigration and asylum systems’ criteria for deciding who can enter and remain in Ireland. For this reason, her childbearing became represented as a means to erode the governmental apparatus for ensuring national sovereignty. Media imagery that characterized asylum seekers’ childbearing in this way included an Irish Examiner headline, “State alert as pregnant asylum seekers aim for Ireland.”32 And, two months later, “Non nationals fuel pregnancy crisis.”33 While the Immigration Control Platform (ICP) is rightly repudiated by many people, their materials are also a barometer of public sentiment. These materials included a leaflet dropped into mailboxes in Dublin 7 that urged people to “stop the invasion and colonization of Ireland.” The leaflet mentioned the maternity-residency clause as the mechanism for invasion and colonization.34 ICP founder Áine Ní Chonáill “described the current government policy on asylum seekers as ‘a charter for invasion,’”35and Ireland as becoming a maternity ward for West Africa. All this language equates asylum seeker women’s childbearing with loss of national sovereignty. There was also a widespread representation of asylum seeker women cynically engaging in childbearing as a means to exploit and abuse the system, nation, and Irish people. For example, this headline claims, “Immigrants exploit Irish baby loophole.”36 Another news story includes, “Speaking in the Dail recently, the Minister said: ‘It is possible for a person to arrive in the State in an advanced state of pregnancy and arrange for their child to be born in the State. Such a system is potentially open to abuse.” This discourse constructs the state and the nation as victims of abuse and exploitation by asylum seeker women. The notion that women were having babies so that they could gain residency and then live off welfare was widely suggested. The benefits asylum seekers received supposedly reduced the benefits available to Irish people. Not surprisingly, the ICP drew connections between asylum seekers’ presence and what they saw as a potential threat to the state’s wealth accumulation strategy. The ICP’s website claims that “A homogenous society such as we have enjoyed is a cheaper society to run than a multi-cultural one. … Social cohesion is not only desirable, it is less expensive. Social instability is not only undesirable; but it has a high monetary cost.” This message reiterates the inaccurate claim that Ireland was homogenous until very recently.37 But it does reflect one of the bigger concerns: that asylum seekers, especially those that get residency, may disrupt the national strategy for capital accumulation.38 ICP’s Ted Neville, running in the 2002 elections, claimed, “it was costing the taxpayers too much to support proposal again exemplifies how asylum seekers’ sex lives are being subjected to extraordinary scrutiny. See Harry Osemwegie, “The Non-Natives Are Getting Restless,” Metro Eireann 3 no. 6 (Oct 2002): 15. 32 4 December 2001, by Donal Hickey 33 Irish Examiner, 21 Feb 2002, by Fionnuala Quinlan. In a similar vein, Cork Fianna Fáil T.D. Noel O’Flynn was reported to have said, “’the asylum crisis is out of control and the country is being held hostage by spongers, wasters, and con-men’ [including by those who use (or abuse)]… the maternity-residency clause in the constitution.” Irish Independent 27 Jan 2002, Ralph Riegel and Geraldine Niland, “Racial Time Bomb Set to Explode As Crisis Deepens.” 34 Irish Independent, 21 January 2002, Kathy Donaghy, “’Racial Hatred’ Leaflets Probed by Gardai.” 35 Irish Times, 11 February 2002, Alison Healy, “Immigrants ‘A Poll Issue.’” 36 Sunday Tribune, 24 May 1998. 37 It also implicitly participates in the rhetoric that claims asylum seekers and immigrants are the cause of racism. 38 Forces both supportive of and opposed to asylum seeker presence often cast their arguments in economic terms. For example, the Irish Business and Employers Council has allied with asylum seekers to argue for asylum seekers’ right to work, on the basis of the economic value of the skills and education they bring to a country that is presently experiencing a shortage of workers.

asylum seekers who ‘dilute’ Irish culture which was essential to attract tourists.”39 Mr. Neville’s comment betrays a narrow, essentializing view of Irish culture—but it is one that is apparently shared by some capital-bearing tourists. In August 2002, the Irish Times reported that some North Americans were upset to be served by people they perceived to be non-Irish nationals; they expected to purchase service from authentic Irish natives, and felt cheated.40 Not unexpectedly, having babies also became conflated with organized crime. The Irish Examiner reported that “criminals in Lagos organize transport to Ireland for pregnant women. The majority of births to asylum seekers in Dublin hospitals are to Nigerian women.”41 To summarize, dominant discourses about asylum seeker women’s pregnancy commonly conveyed beliefs and concerns about crime, welfare abuse, cynical exploitation, cultural “dilution,” economic difficulties, and a crisis of national sovereignty. What was so striking was that all these themes become linked through non-national asylum seeker women’s bodies, which were reduced to their sex organs and reproductive capacities. These discourses have become so ubiquitous that an antiracism training pack for primary school teachers felt compelled to address them. I think that is appropriate, because in my view, the circulation of images and discourses about asylum seekers’ childbearing constitutes a new, unsanctioned mode of promoting racism and racial thinking—even while legislation and institutional efforts to challenge racism have also grown significantly. Keeping in mind that racism is a discourse that, historically, cited bodies and seemingly objective physical criteria to legitimize itself, it is striking that in Ireland, asylum seeker women’s childbearing has become the supposedly objective truth about bodies, especially minority, nonnational, women’s bodies, which circulates before us through media imagery and governmental discourses. Reference to childbearing does not carry the same social condemnation as reference to skin color, hair, eyes, or other criteria on which racist discourses have often seized. But discussion of childbearing nonetheless enables racial and racist imagery to be crafted, consolidated, and circulated, with tangible consequences. 42 I will briefly mention two of these consequences. First, the circulation of this imagery about women’s childbearing offers a means to both introduce new racial and ethnic hierarchies, and reconfigure existing ones. In the process, asylum seeker women become reduced to their childbearing bodies, their vaginas. 43 They become modern-day Sarah Bartmanns, forcibly displayed, and described in ways that enable a new round of re-making of racial, ethnic, gender, and geographic boundaries and hierarchies. As happened to Bartmann, it becomes uncomfortably easy to represent and treat them as animal-like. In 2002, Councillor Dixie Doyle commented that “refugees and asylum seekers are breeding like rabbits here.”44 He is not alone in publicly expressing such sentiments. The construction of asylum seeker women as animal-like not only reiterates racialized imagery through gender and sexuality, but also contributes to a climate of violence and inequality. In 2002, the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism reported that pregnant Black women and Black women with babies have become targets of direct physical assault on the streets. Announcing

Irish Times, 23 February 2002, Caroline Doherty, “Anti-Immigration Group to Field Two Candidates in Poll.” Irish Times, 9 August 2002, “Tourists are Surprised at Number of Non-Nationals Working in Hotels.” Not incidentally, the former Minister for Justice, Mr. O’Donoghue, has become the Minister responsible for Tourism—in other words, for attracting capital-bearing short-term foreign visitors, rather than permanent settler foreigners—to Ireland. 41 Irish Examiner, 4 December 2001, Donal Hickey, “State Alert as Pregnant Asylum Seekers Aim for Ireland.” 42 Childbearing may seem like an objective fact. But although childbearing rates may be something we can objectively quantify, the meanings attached to childbearing rates are quite another issue. I suggest that it is in the meanings that become attached to childbearing rates that racial imagery is crafted and consolidated, with significant consequences. 43 Drazen Nozinic writes, “Refugee women, on the other hand, although perceived in the same degrading way, are even ‘worse.’ They are said to use their reproductive organs and maternal instincts in order to abuse the system. See Nozinic, “One Refugee Experience in Ireland,” in Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland, ed. Lentin and McVeigh, 82. 44 Irish Times, 16 April 2002, Sean Keane, “Councillor Says Asylum Seekers are ‘Breeding Like Rabbits.’” 40

the report, the Irish Independent ran the headline “Pregnant women ‘main target’ of racism here.”45 Significantly, not just asylum seeker women but also Black Irish women have been targets of such violence. There has been a sliding of distinctions among asylum seekers, immigrants, and Black Irish women. All have become positioned as suspect or illegitimate members of the Irish nation, who can be targeted for ill-treatment and exclusion. A second major consequence of these dominant representations of asylum seeker women’s childbearing is that it constructs individual asylum seeker women as abusers and exploiters, and therefore government action against them as a form of legitimate defense of the nation—which becomes retrospectively constructed as sovereign and self-contained until their arrival. It is as if the Irish nation, personified by the Minister for Justice, has become represented as a decent gentleman who’s being taken advantage of by a woman who cynically uses her sexuality. From taking advantage of him, she moves on to take advantage of everyone and everything else, for example, the welfare system. Clearly, this old patriarchal story about women’s sexuality still carries a great deal of power. But this hegemonic story erases the larger relations of power within which the arrival asylum seekers and their childbearing unfolds. Asylum seekers’ arrival can be directly linked to forms of global restructuring and global capital accumulation that are altering nation-states, displacing millions, and resulting in escalating numbers of refugee/asylum seekers worldwide, and at the same time generating prosperity for EU nations including Ireland. Yet, the benefits of economic globalization have been unevenly distributed within Ireland, and many people face greater insecurity than ever before.46 In that context, it is easy to look with anxiety upon the arrival of asylum seekers. But asylum seekers are also people suffering the consequences of globalization and its displacements, or they would not be here. They are not the cause, but the reflection, of globalization and resulting disruptions. However, they have become scapegoated as the cause. Asylum seeker women who bear children have been especially scape-goated. Yet, the Fajujonu decision, which was the means through which they were able to gain residency, is not an example of great generosity or kindly charity, as some would have it. Rather, the decision reiterated a long history of systemically subordinating women to their childbearing role, within the making of the nation, as I have described. The subordination of women to that role occurs through government structures, which the Minister of Justice both represents and continues to instantiate. Within this framework, he is not the victim of women’s sexuality, but a central actor in a patriarchal governance structure.47 Nonetheless, these structural dimensions of power remain erased, as the story of the gentlemanly Minister of Justice being taken advantage of by a woman’s sexuality command credibility and compels action within a patriarchal framework. By taking action, the government becomes reconstructed as the legitimate defenders of the decent, proper Irish nation and people, rightfully restoring their sovereignty and accumulation strategy.48 Asylum seeker women’s childbearing, then, provides a means through which the government can write itself a new mission and mandate for action—even while the government’s own role in undermining national sovereignty 45

Irish Examiner, 14 March 2002, Frank Khan and Galen English, “Pregnant Women ‘Main Target’ of Racism Here.” The Irish Times also carried a story about the report, saying, “An increase in reports of verbal abuse of pregnant black women taunted about having children in Ireland for citizenship purposes will be documented in a report to be launched next week. …. Three visibly pregnant black women have reported being verbally abused in Dublin, while a fourth black Irish woman reported insensitive treatment by a hospital receptionist who assumed she was an asylum seeker, the document will show.” Irish Times, 14 March 2002, Nuala Haughey, “Pregnant Blacks Facing Citizenship Jibes—Report.” 46 Kieran Allen, The Celtic Tiger: The Myth of Social Partnership in Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). See also Irish Times, 24 July 2002, Nuala Haughey, “Gap Between Rich and Poor Increases”; Irish Times, 17 July 2001, Nuala Haughey, “Report by ERSI says Rich-Poor Divide is Widening.” 47 Thus, the role of men and men’s sexuality in the so-called crisis over asylum seekers’ childbearing emerge as significant issues to consider. 48 As David Lloyd writes, “the state requires a substrate which is counter to its laws of civility and which it represents as outrageous and violent, in order that the history of domination and criminalization appear as a legitimate process of civilization and the triumph o f law.” David Lloyd, Anomalous States. Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 127.

in areas such as the economy is significant. In this regard, the Irish government is no different from most national governments. But when the consequences literally come home, it is certainly disingenuous to target asylum seeker womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s childbearing as the cause. Effectively, what is happening is the re-assertion of a limited form of national sovereignty through the vilification and increasing control of non-national womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bodies, even while economic and other forms of sovereignty remain impossible. In the process, new forms of racism have taken root. These racisms function through reference to childbearing, understood as gendered, classed, racialized labor that can be carried out for the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or against the state.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for support of this research.

Irish and ‘brown’ – Mixed ‘race’ Irish women’s identity and the problem of belonging Angeline Morrison Falmouth College of Arts, Woodlane, Falmouth Cornwall TR10 8RX angelinem@yahoo.com

People are beginning to talk about the ‘invisibility’ of Whiteness. I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to ‘make Whiteness strange’, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of ‘Whiteness’ with ‘the human condition’ (Dyer 1997) I want to talk about another kind of Whiteness that has almost total invisibility – this is the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject. I use the term ‘Mixed Race’ mindfully, aware that the term is contested and that some find its reference to the unscientific non-sense of ‘Race’ offensive (Harker 2000). For now, I want to define ‘Mixed Race’ people as the offspring of one White and one non-White parent. Such people have, inscribed on their bodies, evidence of migration somewhere along the line. Such people have, also, traditionally had problems at the tricky task of belonging. Although visually combining a phenotypic mixture of both White and Black features, the Mixed Race subject in a White, racialised society has, overwhelmingly, tended to be read by that society as, simply, ‘Black’. I am interested in also considering the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject, particularly since this is something that both Black and White racialised societies alike – and by ‘racialised’ I mean operating according to what Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe has referred to as the ‘popular folk concept’ of ‘race’ – have tended to deny. (Ifekwunigwe 2001:42) So, the Mixed Race subject as I define her here, inhabits Blackness and Whiteness equally – but in a racialised society, she inhabits Whiteness invisibly. Her whiteness is like a deep stratum; present and felt, but rendered invisible by society. Whilst scholars have written about the cultural or behavioural Whiteness of Mixed Race subjects, (FIND REF) I am so far unaware of any work that specifically foregrounds or makes visible the actual, lived, and (usually) ignored Whiteness that the brown-skinned subject of Mixed Race may claim as a birthright, should she so desire. I am interested in Mixed Race Irish people mainly because of my experiences living here in Dublin for five years in the 1990s. I met a small number of Irish women of Mixed Race, and made friendships with three. In all but one case, those Mixed Race women, regardless of how light their actual skins were, referred to themselves unproblematically (and often, heartbreakingly, in some very self-derogatory ways, as though it were a bad thing) as ‘Black’. I also observed that a majority of White Irish people had difficulty accepting them as, also, ‘Irish’. Through our conversations, my observations, and my own experiences, I found that this reading of their own bodies (and thus identities) as ‘Black’ had largely to do with the way White, racialised Irish society read them. In most cases, my friends had only ever known Irish culture, they considered themselves to be Irish. Their ability to claim their Irish identity, however, was often made problematic for them, and in some cases they were denied outright the possibility of their being ‘really Irish’. In other cases, they were forced to recite their fractions (I’m a quarter Nigerian and a half French and half from Crumlin or whatever), and forced to make a case for an identity which, had they been born with a White phenotype, they could have claimed with the greatest of ease. Their brown skins interfered with other people’s ability to perceive their ‘Irishness’. I was familiar with this from personal experiences of rarely, if ever, being ‘allowed’ to consider myself English. I am also familiar with the wearying inevitability of this definition-from-the-outside that seems to be part of the Mixed Race experience – I have lost count of the times my own self-identifications have been contradicted, ignored or ridiculed by others. The title of Pearl Fuyo Gaskins 1999 book, ‘What Are You: Voices of Mixed Race Young People’ really highlights the fundamental existential questions that many feel entitled to ask the Mixed Race subject, purely on the basis of her optical appearance. 86

To say that western societies polarise Black and White is stating the obvious almost to the point of tautology. But sometimes the obvious needs to be stated; especially when concepts are so deeply encoded into popular consciousness and everyday speech that they acquire a layer of invisibility. In the English language vernacular, for example, we speak quite readily of people seeing things in black and white when what we really mean is that their world view consists of a series of simplistic and rigid dualisms. There is a mass consensus about the phrase that suggests an immediate and shared understanding, again suggesting that seeing Black and White as separate and distinct binary categories is more or less unquestioned. Despite the best efforts of Deconstruction, and subsequent theories which have sought to question the Cartesian dualisms so foundational in Logocentric western thinking, nevertheless, the double-sided conceptual monolith of Black and White retains its stability. It is when this polarisation extends to skin colour, and thus – in a society that assigns identity on the basis of the phenotype – to an individual’s right to define who they are, that problems really begin. ‘Hybridity’ is currently considered as a notion that can be deployed in the negotiation of difference, and a possible alternative to the false binary of Black vs. White. Homi Bhabha has proposed ‘hybridity’ as a space which is, ‘…neither One nor the Other but something else besides, inbetween.’ (Bhabha 1993:219) However, there are problems with what Jacqueline Lo has identified as ‘happy hybridity’. There have been recent examples of this in the British media, where there has been almost a feeding frenzy of light documentaries about the so-called ‘new’ Mixed Race British presence. It has taken them awhile to catch up – ‘Races’ have been mixing for as long as humans have been able to travel. In Britain alone, there is documented evidence of Mixed Race communities in port cities such as Liverpool that date back at least two hundred years. Programmes in this genre, such as Channel 4’s ‘Brown Britain’ (2000) tend to be uncritical and celebratory. Lo reminds us that what Anne McClintock calls ‘enlightened hybridity’ also ‘rehearses the myth of colonialism as the progress and liberation of humanity from a state of deprivation to enlightened reason.’ (Lo 2002:297). I would add that the process of enlightening and thus ‘saving’ the hybrid, also extends to the optical enlightening that takes place in the skins of Mixed Race subjects. We only have to look to Australia for an example of this in practice. The so-called ‘Stolen Generation’ of Mixed Race Aboriginal children were abducted from their natural families and adopted into White families or put into care and forced to ‘forget’ their cultural traditions and language. The aim was to ‘Whiten’ the Aboriginal ‘race’ out of existence. The youngest are still alive today, probably in their fifties. White society was grudgingly prepared to ‘accept’ these Mixed Race subjects, but only on its own terms. Such projects attest to a belief in the inherent cleansing power of Whiteness, the power to transform and to lift. What is paradoxical is that, at the same time, Whiteness is also apparently remarkably easy to erase – so easy that in certain States in America, and in the White imagination in many western societies, a single ‘drop’ of Black ‘blood’ can render someone’s Whiteness invalid (if not invisible). Such cultural practices attest to a belief in Whiteness as something precious, something to be jealously guarded, and something whose borders must be rigorously policed. David Roediger writes that, ‘Whiteness is the empty and terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and whom one can hold back. ’ (Roediger 1991: 13) We can begin to see, then, how the chaotically indeterminate Mixed Race body presents a continual visual threat of instability to Whiteness. The Mixed Race body bears the inscription of the taboo of cross-racial desire, and as such is a site of both fascination and repulsion. The Mixed Race subject continually shows White society that a forbidden union has taken place, and that the boundaries of Whiteness have been transgressed. The Mixed Race subject contains a multiplicity of possible identities, a fluidity, a deferral of signification that confounds the boundaries of Whiteness. More than this, the Mixed Race subject presents to White society the reality that Whiteness can exist in many forms – some of them ‘transgressive’, some of them Brown. Whiteness here is ‘adulterated’ – and as Robert Young (1995) points out, the concept of ‘adulteration’ combines the notion of a sexual transgression (adultery) with the root meaning of ‘ad’ and ‘alter’, therefore, ‘alterity’, and the mixture of Self and Other. So: how does this relate to Mixed Race women in Ireland? Here, I would like to consider Noel Ignatiev’s groundbreaking and contested reading of the Whiteness of Irish people. In his essay ‘How the Irish Became White’, Ignatiev suggests that in America, Irish people gained the rights of 87

citizens in the White republic, transforming themselves from victims of racial oppression, into enforcers of racial oppression49. Concentrating mainly on the 1830s and 1840s, Ignatiev draws parallels between the situation of the Catholic Irish prior to emigration, and of Black people in the US in the same period. He describes how, under Ireland’s 18th and 19th Century penal codes, Catholics could not vote, or hold public office, or practice law or serve in the military or civil service, or teach at a school, or attend university, or possess books, or have inheritance rights unless they converted to Protestantism and disinherited their own family, and so on. In an interview with Danny Poster, Ignatiev says, ‘I suppose it can be captured best by citing an 18th century Anglo-Irish Protestant judge who said that ‘the law presupposes no such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic’. Ignatiev also shows us how, in the White American mid-19th Century imagination, Blacks and Irish were conceptualised equally as subhuman. Contemporary American jokes refer to Blacks as ‘smoked Irish’, and Irish as ‘inside-out niggers’. Irish labourers were used for dangerous work where it would not make financial sense to waste a slave one had already paid for. Ignatiev writes that Irish immigrants and freed Black slaves were thrown together in the same poor districts of the big cities. Here they both socialised and fought. There is evidence of intermarriage. Eventually, however, Ignatiev says that, ‘…rather than joining with Black people – free and slave – to overthrow the system of slavery and racial oppression which prevailed in the United States, they chose, by and large, to find a way to gain for themselves a favoured position within it.’ In 1841, Daniel O’Connell, speaking from a position where Catholics in Ireland were an oppressed race, issued an appeal. He and 70,000 other Irish people called upon the Irish in the United States to join with him and the abolitionists in America, in the struggle to overthrow slavery. O’Connell said, ‘treat the Negro everywhere as your equal, your brother. In doing so you will bring honour to the name of Ireland.’ Tragically, the Irish in America rejected O’Connell’s plea. In choosing to invoke the privileges of Whiteness, they had to distance themselves as much as possible from their prior association, both in the White American imagination and in social reality, with the Black population of North America. They did whatever it took to perform a radical social and conceptual rupture from Black people, with whom they had previously shared a struggle. There were concerted efforts by Irish groups to exclude Black workers from docks, and other jobs on which they felt they had a right to establish a monopoly. The fair skins and European features of the Irish did not automatically guarantee them acceptance as White. They had to earn it, and in doing so, they used the Blacks as a stepping stone. This seems to be a clear example of the coveting of the privileges of Whiteness, which in turn morphs into a tacit conflation of ‘race’ with Nation. If this struggle for an understanding of Irishness as Whiteness was worth fighting or even dying for in the mid-19th Century, then perhaps we can still see echoes of this today. Perhaps the tacit association of Irishness with Whiteness requires a strict policing of the borders of that Whiteness. If Whiteness is dominant in the conceptual binary of ‘White/Black’, then this might explain some of the reluctance to see the Whiteness in the Mixed Race subject. This subject disrupts the binary, exposes it for the trick that it is, and presents the reality of multiplicity as a lived condition. Perhaps, then, the conceptual equation of Irishness with the privileges of Whiteness is also responsible for the readings of Irish Mixed Race people as ‘Black’. I have come across many such readings, particularly in Irish newspapers. In the imagination of a racialised society, Black, as a so-called ‘opposite’, is much further from White than Mixed Race. So, in order to preserve the imagined mastery of Whiteness, Mixed Whiteness must be disavowed. Thus, Mixed Race people can rarely, if ever, be allowed to identify as White, even though they are. They are always and only ever Black (which, of course, they also are). The indeterminacy of the Mixed Race subject historically creates social abrasions. I want to suggest that these abrasions can be taken as positive challenges to the monolithic exclusivity of Whiteness. I think there is a need for Antiracist scholarship to stake claims more fiercely in the area 49

Ignatiev writes specifically about the Catholic Irish, ‘…the first non-Protestant, non-Anglo group of European immigrants to arrive, at the beginning of the 19th Century, around the period when Industrialisation was beginning to take place…’ and described how they, ‘…learned the American racial set-up and found their place in it.’ (interview with Danny Postel, www.zmag.org).

of Whiteness studies – to unmask and disarticulate the link between ‘race’ and nationalism, or ‘Whiteness’ and nationalism, or Whiteness and ‘Irishness’, by heeding the contradictoriness and ambiguity in the concept of Mixed Race. By also heeding the shape-shifting Whiteness in the subject of Mixed Race, and by allowing that subject to decide, perform and change her own identity on her own terms rather than those of Whiteness, perhaps new ground can be gained. If Whiteness is an imposing structure, it is also an inherently unstable one. Deleuze and Guattari write that, ‘Race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, 1980). The same could also be said of Whiteness, that it is defined by whom it manages to exclude. Following on from Ignatiev, I can’t help but wonder if the fashion in White British and White AngloAmerican societies for all things Irish is, in some way, patronising. I wonder if it could be seen as the coloniser’s delight with the colonised’s success at assimilating the coloniser’s way. I don’t know. I am interested to watch how the newly born generation of Mixed Race Irish people will be received, and how they will see themselves. I wonder how they will perform their identities, and how much they will be permitted to perform. Some may become politicised, especially since there are many who, fiercely guarding the gates of what they understand as Irishness, would not want a non White, or a transgressively White subject to be included. In this instance, the Mixed Race Irish subject could become a signifier of a series of complex political battles. I want to suggest that if we now tacitly or unconsciously associate Irishness with Whiteness, the Irish subject of Mixed Race, a sort of indigenous Irish Black, has an important role to play. The subject whose skin combines Blackness and Whiteness can act as a mirror to Whiteness, presenting Whiteness with something that it does not wish to see – that the imagined ‘purity’ of Whiteness is nothing more than that, an imagining. Postscript: In October 2002 I showed some visual art work about these perpetual definitions-from-the-outside that are all too common experiences for the Mixed Race subject. I invented a character, a teenage boy named Carlton Johnson, who lives near where I grew up in a former mining village in the Midlands of England. Carlton has no contact with so-called ‘Black culture’. His Black Jamaican father left his White English mother when Carlton and his identical twin brother were five years old. Clinton, the twin, died in a road traffic accident that same year. Carlton lives alone with his mother, and is the only brown face in his town apart from his best friend Vikram, whose family is Indian. Carlton is jealous of Vikram, because he has a culture, a special language, special food. Vikram knows where he comes from, and when he hears racist misnomers such as ‘Paki’, Vikram is able to be secure in his identity. When Carlton hears racisms such as ‘Nigger’, ‘White Nigger’, and so on, he has no way to relate to them other than his looks, which he always considers to be ‘wrong’. Everyone outside of him is busily forcing a ‘Black’ or at least an ‘Outsider’ identity upon him, when he feels just the same as everyone else. He feels normal. In Carlton’s world, Whiteness is tacitly equated with the human condition – which means that Carlton feels ‘White’. He explores these feelings in a series of diary entries, written as letters to his late brother. Like many people of Mixed Race, Carlton’s right to decide and perform his own identity is continually denied him by those outside of himself. The only difference seems to be that now, instead of being spoken about in the hushed tones of an embarrassing family secret, Mixed Race people of Britain are finally being ‘seen’. This kind of mixture is not new to Ireland, either. Perhaps the notion of a brown Irish person might be becoming more visible now, however, as more Mixed Race Irish babies are being born.

References: Lo, Jacqueline (2000) ‘Beyond Happy Hybridity: Performing Asian Australian Identities’ in Ang et al (eds) Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media & Popular Culture. Annandale, Pluto Press. Bhabha, Homi K. (1993) Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O. (2001) ‘Re-Membering ‘Race’ : On Gender, ‘Mixed Race’ and Family in the English-African Diaspora’ in Miri & Song (eds) 2001 Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’ (42-64). London: Pluto. Ignatiev, Noel (1997) How the Irish Became White. London: Routledge. Roediger, David. (1991) ‘The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class’ London: Verso. Young, Robert. (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London, Routledge.

The Provision of Health Services in Ireland to Women Refugees Who Have Survived GenderBased Torture Inbal Sansani Introduction Examining the provision of health services in Ireland to women asylum-seekers and refugees who have suffered gender-based victimisation is an original and complex endeavour. Asylum in Ireland: A Public Health Perspective (1999), the first investigation of public health issues confronted by the refugee community, concluded that ‘the specific health and social needs of vulnerable groups such as separated children, female asylum-seekers, lone parents, and torture survivors have yet to be studied in Ireland’ (Begley et al., 90). The intersections among these groups expose particularly vulnerable segments of the asylum-seeking population, such as women who are both torture survivors and single parents. Research at the international level reveals that 30-60 per cent of all refugees settled in Europe have experienced torture and other forms of serious violence (Begley et al., 95). Asylum in Ireland disclosed that a Dublin-based general practitioner found that 44 per cent of his asylum-seeking patients have survived torture. Because of survivors’ initial reluctance to share their experiences of trauma with strangers, these figures likely reflect a minimal estimate. The apprehension of divulging one’s trauma is particularly salient with regard to women who have survived rape and other forms of gender-based violence (ICCL, 2000: 23). Despite the great variety of refugee experiences, similarities among the diverse subgroups of this population may be found in the circumstances from which they fled. ‘Persecution’ of, or ‘organised violence’ toward, Nigerian or Romanian refugees, for example, may take different forms, but ‘fear’ and ‘trauma’ even in their distinct manifestations may be comparable. Although ‘not every person who is forced to uproot is necessarily traumatised by the experience’, ‘there is a strongly held view that the tortured refugee remains tortured’ (Baker, 1992: 84). It is also important to note that victims of torture do not suffer alone, because in many cases, the victims’ families, friends and community are also affected. Torture is gender-based, not ‘sexual’ In this paper, I argue that torture is inevitably gendered, and that ‘gender-based’ torture is a more accurate label for acts of torture predominantly characterised as ‘sexual’ in clinical literature. According to the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT: 1999), ‘the most characteristic element of gender-specific state violence is the sexualisation of it’. This claim—that gender-based crimes are often sexualised—suggests that gendered violence is not necessarily ‘sexual’, but that it is made to be so. In my attempt to demonstrate that torture is invariably a gendered phenomenon—that an objective, gender-neutral form of violence does not exist—I construct two arguments. First, I argue that the physicality of the body is necessary for torture to be inflicted, and that this body is necessarily gendered. I also attempt to demonstrate that the ultimate purpose of both rape and torture is to destroy a victim’s sense of self. On that account, I argue that rape is a form of torture. Against this background, I contend that the phrase ‘gender-based torture’ is an accurate description of the torture largely defined in the relevant literature as ‘sexual’. Rape is gendered because it derives meaning from particular social contexts. Rape is also ‘multifunctional’ in the sense that its consequences are dictated by the cultural aspects of a victim’s reality. According to Amnesty International (1993), rape is a humiliating assault both physically and psychologically, as it ‘carries with it traumatic social repercussions, which may be affected by a woman’s cultural origin or social status’. Rape is not merely a physical act that operates independently of social definitions. In fact, although it is in essence a corporal deed, the terror of rape 91

is a social product. Castel describes rape as an act which ‘violates women physically and mentally, humiliates them, devastates their sense of self-respect, undermines their dignity, and often leaves them with a sense of inferior status in the community which may never be undone’ (Castel, 1992: 46). Secondly, I discuss ethnicity as an additional element of identity construction that is manifested in the material body. In this context, I delineate the inextricable link between the social inscriptions of gender and ethnicity. Because the application of torture is contingent upon the existence of material bodies and gender and ethnic identity constructions relate to these physical bodies, torture is a necessarily gendered and ethnicised phenomenon. If torture is a gendered phenomenon, and rape constitutes torture, rape is not only a gendered phenomenon, but it is an engendering mechanism. In both war and relative peace, the gendered subjects of rape are chosen based on their ethnicised identities. Rape is also an ethnicising mechanism in that it is perpetrated according to ethnic constructions and thereby confirms their existence and the legitimacy of the action. Rape is a technique of ethnic cleansing and an avenue for terrorising raped women’s collectivities in times of conflict. Filice et al. (1994: 214) claim that ‘the dynamics of organised and systematic rape of women in specialised rape camps under conditions of war or other situations or armed conflict are more complex than rape women experience under conditions of non-war’. This distinction is important because it reinforces the importance of social context to the understanding of any experience. By recognising that the meaning of an event is derived from a variety of factors, it is possible to concede that these differentiations are offered as typologies rather than hierarchies. The varied but limited definitions of torture hinder the development of its popular understanding. This claim is particularly relevant to the term ‘sexual torture’. The fact that the medical profession refers to gender-based crimes as ‘sexual’ torture is significant in terms of the power of the medical establishment over women’s bodies. Purportedly objective clinical references mask the complexity of this phenomenon. The label ‘sexual’ may fit neatly into the medical model that operates according to the binary terms of health and illness, but it perpetuates the medicalisation of suffering (see, e.g., Davis, 1988). Because ‘sex’ is a biological term, whereas ‘gender’ refers to the socially constructed meanings attached to being female or male, ‘sexual’ torture appears to present a tangible, controllable and ‘scientific’ field of inquiry in relation to dynamic and subjective social constructions. As a result, the label “‘sexual’ torture” renders impossible a complete understanding of this particular type of torture. In general, torture is not a wanton act or an accident; it is a purposeful violation of the autonomy of a human being. Furthermore, it is not employed for ‘any’ reason, but for the specific purpose of destroying the intrinsic dignity and identity of the victim. According to Agger and Jensen, the aim of psychological torture is to ‘break down and shatter the victim’s psychological defence mechanisms and sense of will ‘through manipulation of a complex lattice of common human feelings’ (1993: 686). ‘Breaking down’ an individual entails the destruction of her identity and subsequently yields a sense of disembodiment. The physical body and the victim’s identity cannot function independently of one another. Therefore, when a torture victim is psychologically broken, her relationship with her body changes. Ultimately, if one’s familiar relationship with her body is destroyed, her sense of self and place in the world has also been shattered. Manipulating the social identity affects its connection with the corporeality of the body. Scarry argues that the process of torture ‘splits the human being into two’, making emphatic ‘the ever present but… only latent distinction between a self and a body, between a “me” and “my body”’ (Scarry, 1985: 48-49). To the extent a victim of torture is able to relate to her body after she has been tortured, it is in an unfamiliar and threatening way. The fracturing of one’s sense of self occurs at a different level than that at which the destruction of her physical and psychological integrity takes place. The violation of the intimate self is the ultimate ‘pain’ of torture. ‘Breaking down’ an individual is an eradication of personal identity by the disassociation of a victim from her body and, subsequently, the world at-large. Her mind and her body seem to operate exclusively of one another; as a whole being, she is broken. 92

Although a torture survivor may feel dislocated from her body, she is unable to abandon it. The memory of the injury is retained in her body; I quote Scarry: ‘what is remembered in the body is well remembered’ (Scarry, 1985: 112). On account of the intensely traumatic effects of ‘sexual’ torture and its failure to leave ‘evident or discernable external physical traces’, its use is widespread. With particular regard to rape, Filice et al. (1994) argue that its ‘subjective meaning… is dependent upon [the] historical and cultural conditions that surround it’. Torture is imbued with meaning and power only when it is culturally contextualised. The intimacy of an act that involves one’s sexuality—that is, her gender identity—delegitimises her personal identity both in her perception and in that of her community. Hence, a woman may be the victim of gender-based aggression, but perceived by her collectivity as complicit in the torture inflicted upon her. The source of pain is then found in cultural codes of behaviour. Makiya (1993: 289) explains the experience of shame as a sense that ‘the core of one’s identity is suddenly at stake, but not necessarily because of anything that one has done’. Connell (1995: 71) argues that ‘gender is a social practice that constantly refers to bodies and what bodies do, it is not a social practice reduced to the body’. Gender also references what is done to bodies. In times of conflict, ethnicity references the bodies in question. Constructions of gender and ethnicity are employed in tandem; ‘ethnic affiliation determines who will be victimised, while gender determines the kind of violence that will be perpetrated’ (Cacic-Kumpes, 1995: 12). Lentin (1999) argues that gender and ethnicity gain saliency in wartime; ‘rape in a war context is the means by which differentials of power and identity are defined’ (Rejali, 1998: 30). Because rape engenders and ethnicises, it is a dynamic discourse of identification and negotiation. As the biological reproducers of ‘the nation’, women are particularly vulnerable to forced impregnation. According to Yuval-Davis, as the nation’s cultural reproducers, women are ‘constructed as the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity’ and ‘embody the line which signifies [its] boundaries’ (1997: 45-46). Eisenstein (1998: 21-33) argues that ‘otherness’ is constructed on bodies and that hatred of ‘otherness’ is marked on women’s bodies. Therefore, the physicality of the body is ‘a horribly powerful resource for those who wish to conquer, violate, humiliate, and shame’. Evidence of torture’s presence is manifested in the body’s role as ‘an instrument or intermediary’ for punishment. The body is inseparable from the power relations that invade it. According to Foucault (1977: 16), the body is ‘directly involved in a political field’ in which ‘power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’. Power is embodied and translated in the physicality of the body. Turner explains that the body is an object of power and the product of ‘political/power relationships’ in society (Turner, 1996: 63). Political agendas may be understood to credit bodies with certain degrees of power; subsequently, the body becomes ‘a site of enormous symbolic work and symbolic production’ (Turner, 185). If bodies are perceived to be tangible sites that are inevitably ‘othered’, as Eisenstein posits, they are located at the centre of political/power relationships. As an instrument, weapon and canvas for pain, the body on both sides of the torture power equation is inscribed with meaning. Therefore, as a material reality, the body is indispensable to the execution of torture. Understanding the power relations manifested through physical pain is compounded by a psychological sense of betrayal, as ‘the person in great pain experiences [her] own body as the agency of [her] agony’ (Scarry, 1985: 47). Beyond the realm of physical pain, the body as the ‘medium of the self’, as Turner has termed, is the context in which torture is enacted (Turner, 66). For this reason, psychological torture may be effective even if it does not include physical punishment, because the psychological component of torture is omnipresent. Indeed, the currency of pain is bound up with the corporeality of the body. Therefore, the threat of rape may not be physically tangible, but it is directly related to the material body. Conceptually, the body’s physical presence as a ‘felt site’ remains central to the act of intimidation. Hence, ‘pain’ is not only experienced in the body, but also in the mind. Torture is a breaking of bodies and minds. These bodies are gendered and ethnicised. The interrelationship between gender and ethnicity is constant. Bodies are ‘othered’ according to political agendas. In Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early Nineties, rape dually asserted and enforced gender and ethnic identities: ‘Bosnian Serb forces not only bolstered their own masculinities and identities as “Serbs” but eroded the identities of the non-Serbs by the extreme humiliation associated 93

with [rape]’ (Hague, 1997: 53). The justification of genocidal rape and the act of raping by the Serb or Bosnian Serb soldier: ‘asserts his hetero-nationality—a different national identity than that of the rape victim. In turn the rape victim has her or his national identity (as Bosnian) rejected and humiliated as it is forced, by the rape, into an inferior position as feminine (Hague, 1997: 53-55). As a member of a particular ethnic or national group, the rape victim is feminised. When ethnic conventions are at stake, ‘their renegotiation is the context of rape’ and rape becomes an ‘ethnomarker’ (Rejali, 1998: 30). The ‘othering’ process that creates ethnic divisions is embodied in various ways. If no clear relationship exists between groups in times of ‘peace’, escalation into ethnic conflict immediately thrusts women’s roles into the foreground as the markers of ethnic boundaries and reproducers of ethnic difference. Basic group symbols are called into play and women are reduced to the physicality of their bodies. Rejali contends that ‘when an unmarked system collapses, as in Bosnia, women’s bodies become a battlefield where men communicate their rage to other men— because women’s bodies had been the implicit political battlefield all along’ (Rejali, 1998: 30). Lentin argues that ‘rape is not a unitary discourse, nor is it a unitary practice’ (Lentin, 1999: 3.7). Both women and men experience rape as a humiliating and disempowering act that ultimately shatters their senses of self. The distinction among experiences of rape is based on the physical sex and gender identities of the bodies in question. An obvious differentiation is the physiological function of women and men in regard to reproduction. It is a fact that making ‘Chetnik’ babies in Bosnia or Hutu babies in Rwanda are genocidal goals that can only be realised through the violation of women’s bodies. Forced impregnation was an effective tool for ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the minds of the Serbian soldiers who assumed that ethnicity was necessarily patrilineal. Women are also constructed as the ‘cultural symbols of the collectivity, of its boundaries, as carriers of the collectivity’s “honour” and as its intergenerational reproducers of culture’ (YuvalDavis, 1997: 67). Furthermore, women are assigned the task of guarding a group’s borders; hence they maintain and ideologically reproduce the ‘mythical unity of national “imagined communities” which divides the world between “us” and “them”’ (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 23). Women’s bodies symbolise the first and final frontiers of an ethnic group. According to Loomba (1998: 159), ‘[w]omen… demarcate both the innermost sanctums of race, culture and nation, as well as the porous frontiers through which these are penetrated’. A highly effective transgression across the enemy group’s boundaries is achieved through the rape of its women. Rape in conflict reaffirms the conception of women’s bodies as the figurative and literal boundaries of an ethnic group. In one respect, women embody the territory in question. Women’s bodies are tangible places in which to locate political power struggles. Additionally, penetrating the ethnic enemy’s core—humiliating, degrading, and shaming its society—is most efficiently achieved through the rape of its women. Rape is indeed the ultimate manifestation of the enemy’s trespass. The rape of the women in a community can therefore be regarded as the symbolic rape of the body of the community (Seifert, 1998: 64), or, has Lentin has described, the ‘rape of the nation’ (Lentin, 3.12; emphasis in original). Social constructions of gender and ethnicity imbue the act of rape with incredible power. Gender-based torture and rehabilitation Recognising gender-based torture as an intensely destructive and complex phenomenon compels a critical examination of rehabilitation and survival. There are many issues involved in the rehabilitation of torture survivors and, ultimately, their ability to reconstruct their shattered lives. The increasing number of women in Ireland’s refugee community accentuates the disparity between their particular needs and the various services available to them. A 1998 study by McVeigh and Binchy of the relationship between racism and the statutory sector as it relates to the experiences of refugees and Travellers in Tallaght found a lack of specific support toward refugees across the statutory sector (1998: 28-30, 42-43, 50-53). The Health Boards responsible for the provision of services to refugees in Ireland insist that this population is not treated differently to anyone else, maintaining that the statutory sector does not discriminate against Travellers and refugees. McVeigh and Binchy problematise this lack of ‘positive or antidiscriminatory intervention,’ claiming that treating refugees like anybody else is often an excuse for 94

not having a specific programme to address the particular disadvantage experienced by certain groups. More importantly, they argue that it is often necessary to treat marginalized groups differently—to develop specific policies and programs—in order to address their social exclusion and ensure that they have the same access to services as everybody else. The failure to fully recognise and respond to the specific needs of refugees ‘distorts institutional policy across a wide number of agencies . . . and combines as a particular form of institutionalised racism’. This outcome justifies the need for appropriate counseling and support services. In order to gauge the extent of the need for services available to women who have survived gender-based torture, my methodology focused on the views of services providers who address different refugee needs. ‘Service providers’ include representatives from various government-funded and independent programmes and organizations that deal with issues concerning refugees’ life issues, as well as academics whose work focuses on ethnic and racial issues as they relate to the development of social policy (e.g. McVeigh, 1996; McVeigh and Binchy, 1998). In an analysis of the internalisation of values by actors as this relates to the transformation of social systems, Saltman et al. (1998: 351) argue that ‘actors can transform themselves and participate in the transformation of the field in which they interact if new information modifies their perceptions of things’. General practitioners are such actors who ‘are simultaneously defined by the relations that they maintain with the other actors and by the symbolic and material resources that they control’ (Saltman et al., 351). Approaching the sector that is responsible for service provision is a direct route to the assessment of the actors’ performance in the context of their resources. Berkowitz et al. (1996: 159) argue that the causes of discrimination in health care are more subtle and complex than overt manifestations of discrimination. They claim that ‘because most service providers consider their services open to all, they may not be aware of the web of barriers faced by members of minority groups, such as: lack of knowledge of available services… fear, language and cultural barriers, and a history or reputation of discrimination’ (e.g. Harel et al., 1987; Markides and Mindel, 1987; Stanford, 1980). If services were truly constructed to provide for ‘all’, these barriers would be non-existent or less of an impediment because they will have been originally accounted for in the service structure and provider education. The ‘special’ needs of different ‘minority’ ethnic groups in a multicultural society are determined by the standards of the ‘majority’ group(s) in power. The communal institutions in such ethnically variegated societies rarely reflect the breadth of experience within them. Ethnic minority women’s inclusion in the service delivery models of popular establishments is contingent upon the attitudes of both ‘the white man’ and the (mainly) male leadership of their particular ethnic collectivity. Although confronting overt, covert and de facto racial discrimination in medical institutions is not unusual for any ‘minority’ ethnic client, the issue for women is more complex because, as Yuval-Davis argues, ‘often “different” cultural traditions are defined in terms of culturally specific gender relations’ (Saghal and Yuval-Davis, 1992). My initial inclination to interview service providers was compounded by a deliberate choice not to access directly the “user” group—women who have survived gender-based victimisation. I quickly realised that I had made the right decision. After introducing my research topic to service providers in the preliminary stage of each interview, I encountered what I perceived as hesitant or even resistant reactions from several of the interviewees. Their immediate responses suggested that it would be extremely difficult for me to find women to interview because ‘they don’t talk about these things’. I was not surprised by this warning, as I had deliberately decided not to seek ‘personal narratives’ from women who had experienced gender-based victimisation for several reasons. My goal was to provide a fair evaluation of service provision in Ireland without placing further intrusive demands on a group—the “users”—that may be described as ‘over-researched’. My decision was also motivated by a wish to avoid confronting the issue of a woman’s trauma of rape, for example, without being adequately trained to deal with the consequences of asking survivors to share such difficult and terrorising experiences. I also believe that one of the key distinctions between “providers” and “users” in this context is that providers constitute a more empowered and less vulnerable group. A woman psychologist at the Eastern Health Board explains that torture survivors are individuals exhibiting ‘normal responses to abnormal experiences’ (Interview, 10 May 2000). This 95

simplistic phrase is popular among professionals in the trauma rehabilitation field. Although I am cautious in employing the term ‘normal’, I believe that this message is fundamentally valid. A campaign for specialised services does not suggest that refugees’ reactions to torture are ‘abnormal’. Indeed, Elsass (1997: 6-7) argues that the ‘psychotherapy of torture survivors is surprisingly traditional’. He claims that it is often simply described as ‘the need to tell and live through the traumatic event, but without the provocation which otherwise may characterise crisis intervention’. In addition, Elsass argues that torture must be perceived in the ‘wider context that continues to traumatise the survivor’. As torture is ultimately world-destroying, its effects may not be sufficiently combated by the generalised services available to the majority population in Ireland. A greater coherence among services would also allow refugees to tackle immediate needs upon arrival and subsequently address needs that are more specific. A woman counselor at the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) explains that prospective clients may not possess the ‘rudimentary levels of safety and stability in their inner and outer worlds’ that the Centre requires for initiating service (Interview, 12 June 2000). She elaborates that a sense of security may not necessarily involve ‘the house or the status’, but that in order to constructively confront gender-based trauma, a survivor must not be ‘currently in crisis around other things’. Although the counselor acknowledges that refugees suffer multiple and interconnected traumas, she maintains that if a woman has established a relatively safe daily context she may succeed in approaching her rape trauma more directly, even if it remains bound up with other crises. Similarly, a private practice psychologist in Dublin maintains that because ‘a context of safety and trust’ does not necessarily exist for refugees, ‘just talking is not enough… you need a special setting to bring people through [their trauma]’. Mollica and Caspi-Yavin (1992) explain that because torture has many unique cultural meanings, cultural traditions and the survivor’s language help mediate ‘the process of understanding and giving meaning to the torture experience’ throughout the rehabilitation process. The Irish health service delivery system is also undermined by a general disbelief of refugees’ stories among the government and public at-large. An African doctor who has worked with refugees in Dublin and abroad claims that ‘the first problem is the acknowledgement of what they have gone through in their countries’ (Interview, 17 May 2000). Further, a refugee from Central Africa explains that during asylum claim interviews, immigration officials ‘tell you that you were not tortured, that there is no torture in your country’ (Interview, 15 June 2000). Similarly, a lawyer with Dublin Corporation contends that ‘disbelief adversely impacts on [refugees’] ability to heal’ (Interview, 16 May 2000). Consistent with the lawyer’s advocacy of integrated services is the suggestion that the government and service providers must jointly ‘tackle the tension between the need for patient-centred treatment and… a system that reinforces the damage by refusing to believe people’s stories’. Refugees’ vulnerability and suspicion upon arrival are exacerbated by a system that disregards their personal recollections in order to deny their claims for asylum. Consequently, a refugee who has been through a reception of disbelief is unlikely to share her story with a health care provider. Lunde and Ortmann (1992) argue that time does not ‘cure all wounds’. Indeed, the power to heal, recover and rehabilitate is distinctly defined in the context of torture survival. If it is accepted that the effects of torture cannot be reversed, healing, recovery, and rehabilitation must be understood as continuous processes with subjective goals. In essence, it may be suggested that survival is a matter of degrees. Distrust prevents refugees from accessing health care and support from their new environment. The refugee doctor from Africa claims that ‘unless [refugees] have confirmation from someone they trust, they will not engage with the service because they don’t know where the information will go’ (Interview, 17 May 2000). The purpose of rehabilitation is to assist torture survivors to live productively with their trauma. Although torture cannot be reversed, the course of rehabilitation is opposite to that of torture. Fundamentally, rehabilitation is focused on building up the survivor in order to repair to whatever extent possible the breaking down she had suffered as a victim of torture. Cunningham and Silove (1993) suggest a flexible approach that allows the therapist to focus on both ‘the intrapsychic residue of the torture experience, as well as [on] strategies that will aid survivors to develop a sense of agency in dealing with their new and often alien environment’. 96

On a general level, van Willigen (1992: 294-95) argues that because organised violence threatens all aspects of health, ‘it is of great importance to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to [its] consequences’. A multidisciplinary approach to rehabilitation includes the survivor client as a whole human being as opposed to a compilation of different pieces, which, if ‘broken’, can only be fixed by a group of specialists. Because the effects of torture are ultimately psychological, it is inaccurate, misleading and ineffective to differentiate among the spectrum of crises the survivor may experience as a result of torture. The refugee survivor is not on neutral territory in a country of resettlement. She confronts a multitude of issues in the host country that create the context for her rehabilitation. For this reason, it is inappropriate to attempt to separate among a refugee’s different traumas. In order for the survivor to heal completely, it is necessary to confront her rehabilitation from a holistic perspective. An independent doctor from Africa regards the lack of a holistic approach—‘taking in all aspects of life’—in the Irish medical system as one of the main obstacles to refugees’ health care. His personal and professional experience with refugees leads him to conclude that refugees harbour an assumption that in the context of ‘white people, white medicine’, their problems will not be understood. He claims that ‘when you speak with someone, you must explore everything—physical, mental/psychological, social, [and] spiritual aspects’. However, he suggests that such an integrated approach—‘analysing a problem from different perspectives’—may not be possible in Ireland’s ‘system of specialists’. On account that ‘a physical or mental problem can have [its] source in the social or spiritual… a person can have a few problems at one time and… see four or five specialists, but it’s still the same problem’ (Interview, 17 May 2000). Conclusion In 2001, the first specialized center for torture survivors was established in Ireland. The Centre for the Care of Survivors of Torture (CCST) provides multidisciplinary health care services to torture survivors. Operating out of SPIRASI House, the CCST acts as a bridge to mainstream services, and provides its clients with both clinic and social inclusion activities, free of charge. The establishment of the CCST is quite remarkable and represents very important progress in the development of appropriate services for torture survivors in Ireland. It is, however, a normative and necessary step in a path toward comprehensive rehabilitation services to all of Ireland’s refugees. References Agger, I. and S. Jensen. 1993. ‘The psychosexual trauma of torture’ in J. Wilson and B. Raphael (eds.) International Handbook of Traumatic Stress Syndromes. New York: Plenum Press Amnesty International. 1993. Bosnia-Herzegovina: Rape and Sexual Abuse by Armed Forces. London: Amnesty International Publications. Baker, R. 1992. ‘Psychosocial Consequences for Tortured Refugees Seeking Asylum and Refugee Status in Europe’ in M. Basoglu (ed.) Torture and its consequences: Current treatment approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Begley, M., C. Garavan, M. Condon, I. Kelly, K. Holland and A. Staines. 1999. Asylum in Ireland: A Public Health Perspective. Department of Public Health. University College Dublin. Benninger-Budel, C. and A. Lacroix. 1999. Violence Against Women: A Report. Geneva: World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT). Berkowitz, S. 1996. ‘Using Qualitative and Mixed-Method Approaches’ in R. Reviere, S. Berkowitz, C. Carter and C. Ferguson (eds.) Needs Assessment: A Creative and Practical Guide for Social Scientists. Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Francis. Cacic-Kumpes, J. 1995. ‘War, Ethnicity, and Violence Against Women’. Refuge. 14(8): 12-15. Castel, J.R. 1992. ‘Rape, Sexual Assault, and the Meaning of Persecution’. International Journal of Refugee Law. 4(1): 39-56. Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cunningham, M. and D. Silove. 1993. ‘Principles of Treatment and Service Development for Torture and Trauma Survivors’ in J. Wilson and B. Raphael (eds.) International Handbook of Traumatic Stress Syndromes. New York: Plenum Press. Davis, K. 1988. Power Under the Microscope: Toward a Grounded Theory of Gender Relations in Medical Encounters. Dordrecht: Foris Publications Holland. Eisenstein, Z. 1998. Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge. Elsass, P. 1997. Treating Victims of Torture and Violence: Theoretical, Cross-Cultural, and Clinical Implications. New York: New York University Press. Filice, I., C. Vincent, A. Adams, and F. Bajramovic. 1994. ‘Women Refugees from BosniaHerzegovina: Developing a Culturally Sensitive Counseling Framework’. International Journal of Refugee Law. 6(2): 207-225. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books. Hague, E. 1997. ‘Rape, Power and Masculinity: The Construction of Gender and National Identities in the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina’ in R. Lentin (ed.) Gender and Catastrophe. London: Zed Books. Harel, Z., E. McKinney and M. Williams. 1987. ‘Aging, ethnicity, and services: Empirical and theoretical perspectives’ in D.E. Gelfand and C.M. Barressi (eds.) Ethnic Dimensions of Aging. New York: Springer. Irish Council for Civil Liberties Women’s Committee. 2000. Women and the Refugee Experience: Towards a Statement of Best Practice. Dublin: ICCL Women’s Committee. Lentin, R. 1999. ‘The Rape of the Nation: Women Narrativising Genocide’. Sociological Research Online 4(2) www.socresonline.org.uk/4/2/lentin.html Loomba, A. 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. Lunde, I. and J. Ortmann. 1992. ‘Sexual torture and the treatment of its consequences’ in M. Basoglu (ed.) Torture and its Consequences: Current Treatment Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Makiya, K. 1993. Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Markides, K. and C. Mindel. 1987. Aging and Ethnicity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Mollica, R. and Y. Caspi-Yavin. 1992. ‘Overview: the assessment and diagnosis of torture events and symptoms’ in M. Basoglu (ed.) Torture and its Consequences: Current Treatment Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McVeigh, R. 1996. The Racialisation of Irishness: Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland. Belfast: CRD. McVeigh, R. and A. Binchy. 1998. Travellers, Refugees and Racism in Tallaght. Dublin: West Tallaght Resource Centre. Rejali, D. 1998. ‘After Feminist Analyses of Bosnian Violence’ in L.A. Lorentzen and J. Turpin (eds.) The Women & War Reader. New York: New York University Press. Saghal, G. and N. Yuval-Davis (eds.) 1992. Refusing Holy Orders: Women and Fundamentalism in Britain. London: Virago. Saltman, R., J. Figueras and C. Sakellarides (eds.) 1998. Critical Challenges for Health Care Reform. Buckingham: Open University Press. Scarry, E. 1985. The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Seifert, R. 1994. ‘War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis’ in A. Stiglmayer (ed.) Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Stanford, E.P. 1980. Minority aging: Policy issues for the 80’s. San Diego: Campanile. Turner, B.S. 1996. The Body and Society. London: Sage. van Willigen, L. 1992. ‘Organisation of Care and Rehabilitation Services for Victims of Torture and Other Forms of Organized Violence: A Review of Current Issues’ in M. Basoglu (ed.) Torture and its consequences: Current treatment approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yuval-Davis, N. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage. 98

“I remember when years ago in Italy…”: Italian women in Dublin telling the diaspora. Carla De Tona 50 “No, it is I who thank you. Every night before I fall asleep here on my narrow bed, I go over my life. I memorize it, in case anyone should ask” (Myerhoff, 1992 :241) Introduction This paper problematises women’s invisibility in migration studies, and uses diasporic theories to show how gender lies at the heart of migration phenomena. The aim is not simply to uncover women’s participation in migration, but rather to show how women’s invisibility is the outcome of a biased misrepresentation. In fact, women have always been present and have always had active roles in migration phenomena. The silent presence with which migrant women are often represented (and often represent themselves too) is not the outcome of their existential condition but the means through which the discrimination of their condition is perpetrated. I also want to demonstrate how, while learning about migrant women, we can learn more about the entire migrants’ groups. I employ these theories in order to broach issues regarding Italian women living in Ireland. Italian women have remained an invisible group inside the already invisible groups of Italians residing in Ireland. I began by exploring the reasons of the invisibility of Italians in Ireland; I then consider the role of Italian women, not merely as economic contributors, but as narrators of the Italian diaspora. I also consider how Italian women manage to create a community of identity out of the collective and fluid narrativization of their memories, allowing a positive affirmation of the Italian diversity in alternative and diasporic spaces. Diaspora and gender, a theoretical framework “Here the invented traditions of diaspora take on their full weight, as the story of an epic journey from eternity to here (and maybe hell) and back again” (Cohen, 1997 :7)

The term diaspora has become prevalent in the last decades in the social sciences, but it still remains a contested and under-theorized concept. It is used in a more general sense as a descriptive and typological tool to indicate the dispersal of an original unitary group; its postmodern version (Anthias, 1998) denotes more a social condition, i.e. the condition of “migrants of belongings” (Fortier, 2001) in a “global space of pain” (Cohen, 1999). In this last sense diaspora proves a terrain of theoretical creolization (Brah, 1996), which looks at diasporic identities and diasporic spaces as hybrid, multiple, and fluid. Diaspora is still an emergent concept, which cannot fully define the differences between diaspora and other kinds of migration (in other words all migration phenomena can be definable as diaspora, thus deflating the concept). Yet in the sense of a social condition, the strength of the concept of diaspora corresponds with this weakness, as in its exhaustiveness, it creates a space to think about the

I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the ‘Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ for this paper and to thank Dr. Ronit Lentin and all the Italian men and women who are collaborating with my research.

intersectionality and relationality of different social categories, which helps to understand those gendered, classed, aged groups of migrants, which often remain invisible in migration studies. I consider in particular how diaspora is useful in thinking about migrant women. Women’s experiences have been largely ignored in migration studies (DeLact, 1999, Wright, 1995, Koffman et al. 2000). Diasporic theories permit a maturation of the feminist thought, which allows not simply a women-centred analysis, but a truly gendered understanding of migration phenomena (Pedraza, 1991 :305). Although mainstream diasporic scholars haven’t been particularly eager to include gender as a special explanatory concept (Unterhalter, 2000 :111), feminist critics have picked on its potential reach and have been able to gather a relevant body of theoretical suggestions and empirical data in this direction. The most explicit theoretical accounts have been made by Floya Anthias, Nira Yuval Davis, and Avtar Brah, (and in the Irish context by Ronit Lentin and Breda Gray). A gendered diaspora looks at how gender roles and relations (both of the migrant group and the receiving society) inform the processes of accommodation of migrants and the negotiations of their community’s boundaries and positionalities. Through a gendered diasporic framework, it becomes possible to see how gender roles enable the migrant group “to occupy a certain economic niche for example, or reproduce dynamically, in a selective way the cultural, symbolic and material relations it lives within” (emphasis is mine) (Anthias, 1998 :16). The bulk of the work so far seems to concentrate on women and their roles as (physical and symbolic) transmitters and reproducer of the group’s own sense of identity, and in particular on what Nira Yuval Davis calls their “pivotal roles as territories markers and reproducers of the narrative of the nations and other collectivises” (my emphasis) (Yuval Davis, 1997 :39). Italians in Ireland, an historical view “We are foreigners there, we are foreigners here! What the hell are we?” (My interview)

According to the Italian Embassy’s lists, in 2002, there were 4976 Italians residing in Ireland, yet a more likely estimate is 7000. Newer waves of Italian migrants have been joining Italian migrants’ groups settled in Ireland, since the turn of the last century. The largest influx of Italian migrants was during the 1950s and 1960s. Italians constitute one of the longest established and most prominent groups of foreigners in Ireland (Reynolds, 1993) and have represented an exceptional case in the history of Irish out-migration. Their case is exceptional also if we look at the hybridity of their activities (Fish and Chips) and the economic success they achieved, despite the politics of silencing inflicted on them. Official data shows that only 52% of the total population of Italians was born in Italy, 36% in Ireland and the rest in other countries; 848 (one sixth of the total) Italians have returned to Italy and 517 transferred to other countries. This indicates a mobile population, which holds various transnational diasporic links. The population is characterized by a strong chain migration with over half of the Italians coming from the same area between Rome and Naples. There is a diffuse recognition of an Italian presence in Ireland, as something familiar and known (in relation to food, tourism and Catholic matters, but also in the consistent inclusion of narratives concerning Italians in the chronicles of life and history in Ireland). Yet on a more ‘official’ level, there are only sporadic accounts of Italians in Ireland. For example in the contemporary debates on Irish multiculturalism, the Italian case is almost never mentioned. Thus although Italianess in Ireland resides deep in the Irish social tissue, there it remains unquestioned and hidden. It is a silencing act, which concerns the way that Italianess is represented and constructed. This idea relates to what in postcolonial and psychological studies has already been conceptualised as the ‘othering’ process, which many Irish scholars are increasingly applying to the Irish context (McVeigh 100

and Lentin, 2002). Concepts of othering and otherness relate to “the production of ‘representations’ of the other’s images and beliefs” as contrasting characteristic of the self, and how in so doing they reinforce the group’s own sense of identity (Miles, 1989 :11). “It is only through the relation to the other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what it has been called its constitutive outside that the ‘positive’ meaning of any term- and thus its identity- can be constructed” (Hall, 1996 :4-5). In Ireland the process of national identification is doubly related to theories of otherness. Given their colonial past, Irish people have for long been represented as an ‘othered’, subjugated population. ‘Irishness’ had to confront this historicity, re-inverting it, and thus affirming its identity, proclaiming a sense of unity and homogeneity, at the exclusion of any form of diversity (Lentin, 2002 :235). The exclusion has been achieved also at the symbolic level of cultural representations. The Italian diaspora has been represented in many different Irish narratives (movies, novels or simply in the in the gossips of the friends of the ‘chippers’ and of taxi drivers) as a ‘backdrop’ against which to draw the lines of stronger features of Irish cultural characteristic (see for example Tom Murphy’s play The Gigli Concert, and Peter Sheridan’s novel 44. A Dublin Memoir – Murphy, 1984; Sheridan, 1999). Beside this, the cultural characteristics of the Italians, even in their regional and class variation, hasn’t found proper grounds of expression in the Irish context. Many Italians who moved to Ireland in the 1990s complain about the lack of any interest in ‘real’ Italian culture, apart from its commodified and ‘banalised’ version. Moreover, culturally so similar, the Italian diaspora in Ireland constituted a suitable group of foreigners to be symbolically absorbed as Irishness’ “own otherness” (Cohen, 1996), thus creating a form of a ‘smooth’ othering process, which hasn’t manifested in overt forms of discrimination. However limitations in the grounds of expression implied that the particular needs of Italians migrants have been ignored (there are no official Italian schools, although Dublin has a German school and a French school, at both primary and secondary level). Italians have been ‘pushed’ to cover roles functionally ‘useful’ to the Irish hegemonic discourses, like filling the “food traumatic void” in Irish culture (Diner, 2001) with their catering activities. ‘Smoothly’ othered, ‘unproblematically’ absorbed and accepted (Italians are often portrayed as ‘those’ neighbours, acquaintances, local ‘chippers’, whose diversity when brought up, always surprises a bit, as if it were something new or forgotten) Italians in Ireland have been confined in a form of ‘symbolic ghetto’ which hasn’t been expressed physically, but which has limited them nonetheless. From inside the ‘symbolic ghetto’ Italians have accommodated themselves well, they have prosperity, economic success, and they have created a ‘community’ – for example a journal for Italians migrants, Italia Stampa, has been published since 1983; there is an Italian Catholic mass held since the end of 1970s in an oratory beside the Pro Cathedral in Dublin; recreational clubs have been founded, etc. Italians have used diasporic strategies and resources to find ‘alternative’ modes of expression of their subjectivities and identities. Many Italians have built luxurious houses in Italy where they don’t really live, and not in Ireland where they do live, tending to live in simpler houses beside or above their shops. Thus if we consider silence as a failure of listening, we can become aware of the presence of ‘cracks’ in that silence and we can also understand women’s ability to fill them with their stories. Telling the gendered diaspora “Women already recognize each other not by essentialist notions of diaspora identity, but by a shared circumstance that is still imperfectly articulated. We are the ones who try to keep on trying to unsay” (Lygates, 1996 :159) One way to consider how gender roles inform the accommodation practices of Italians in Ireland, is to look at how women are responsible for the narrativization of diasporic lives. Diaspora theories alert us to the narrative process of forming collective identities. Avtar Brah has argued that the identification with a diasporic imagined community is forged and re-forged within 101

and out of a confluence of narratives (my emphasis) (Brah, 1996 :183). She writes that diasporas are composite formations interweaving multiple travellings: “a text of many distinctive and perhaps even disparate narratives. (…) This multiple journeys may configure into one journey via a confluence of narratives as it is lived and re-lived, produced, reproduced and transformed through individual as well as collective memory and re-memory. It is within this confluence of narrativity that ‘diasporic community’ is differently imagined under different historical circumstances. By this I mean that the identity of the diasporic imagined community is far from fixed or pregiven. It is constituted within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life, in the everyday stories we tell ourselves individually and collectively” (my cursive) (Brah, 1996 :183). The fluidity of diasporic identities is contained in a confluent stream of narrativity. Stories (the narrated material) and narrations (the discourse with which the story will be narrated) construct ontological maps. Life and self is fully experienced when it is narrativized, told and shared, and the self comes into being through acts of memory, reflexivity and engagement with others, which must be communicated to be effective (Stanford Friedman, 1998). Stories “are narrated by someone, and there is someone who listens to them. Therefore, they are between us. Or better, they constitute the us: the us connected in the act of narration, we who will know the story… to tell stories has something of an attitude of love” as the Italian sociologist Paolo Jedwlosky evocatively claims (Jedlowski, 2000 :96). The narrativisation of diasporic lives is the process through which diasporic identities are formed and re-formed, in the everyday lived experience of telling stories, out of a continuous process of erasure, recollection and redefinition of past memories. Memories are about forgetting more than remembering. Their narrativisation harmonises the incongruences and discontinuities of migrants’ lives. Diaspora involves a strong dependence on this act of narrative harmonization of memories, in as far as life events of diasporic people, with their extreme breaks and changes, need to be mended together and adapted to mutable and contradictory situations, what Sara Ahmed calls the “discontinuities of personal biographies and wrinkles in the skin” (Ahmed, 1999 :343). The narrativisation of past memories allows surrogating new adaptative meanings out of an old and stable trust in a primordial and original belonging. Women seem particularly inclined towards narrative practices, and seem to have been granted a particular authority in chronicling family memories (Haaken, 1998 :8). They seem to have a privileged relationship with memories, as memories are ‘emotional products’, enhanced and driven by emotional states, and women have personified the “receptacles and bearers of emotionally laden cultural knowledge” (Haaken, 1998 :9). The relation of narratives with memories is very deep. Janice Haaken has showed how remembering is a gendered activity, the “product of social locations and of those collectively organized fantasies and beliefs about gender that dynamically shape what aspects are likely to be preserved. So too, gender mediates the accessibility of memory and the anxieties and defences mobilized in the process of recollecting” (Haaken, 1998 :12). Moments of ‘crisis’, states of anxiety or conflicts, motivate memory search. The past is reactivated and a new configuration arises out of previous recollections” (Haaken, 1998 :15). “Standing at the threshold between private and public life, the female psychological subject is divided between those internalised structures that constitutes the social ego and those insurgent internal forces opposing it. Struggling to emerge out of the suffocating constraints of domesticity, this subject searches for a new mode of self expression, particularly during eras when the social boundaries of gender are shifting” (Haaken, 1998 :271). This argument about how men and women remember differently, (and of course about which ‘men’ and which ‘women’) lies beyond the reach of this paper, yet I am interested in exploring how women capacity “to speak the unspeakable, to violate the mandates to remain silent” in eras of shifting social boundaries (Haaken, 1998 :10) can be selectively reproduced, as a gender strategy, in migrants’ group dynamics to accommodate in new societies. 102

Moreover, more relevant to my argument is not how women remember, but how they tell their memories. “Ancient or modern, their art has been inspired from a wise repulsion for the universal abstract and follows a daily practice where narration is existence, relationship, and attention. (…) In the kitchen, in trains, in school corridors, between a pizza and a glass, women above all symptomatically tell life stories” (Cavarero, 1997 :73). Paolo Jedwloski has contested the essentialisation of the terms ‘men’ and ‘women’ in Cavarero’s statement, but recognizes its consistence as a contextualised cultural trait. He agrees that in particular social settings, women being traditionally denied of a “space for action where the self could mirror itself, would traditionally look to narration for the reality of a subjectivity otherwise denied” (Jedlowski, 2000 :100). Giovanna: “I remember when years ago in Italy, when we used to go back in the summer, like when they were living here… Maria: “And any time of these came back over, I mean the people from England came over…” Giovanna: “Noi eravamo gli stranieri!” (We were the foreigners) Maria: “Yes, there was about 20 kids waiting for them, to arrive in the village, ‘cause you know, I like chocolate...” Giovanna: “We would have chocolate!” Maria: “Chocolate and sweets, and we’d be waiting for them and we’d haunt them, we’d been their friends, we’d been, come si dice in italiano? Insomma, gli stavamo sempre, we would be their best friends and so we’d get the chocolate…And there was only one tv in the village and they killed each other to go up and see it…” (My interviews) Italian women in ireland Women of the first waves of migration to Ireland seem to maintain traditional roles, which construct them as adaptative and ‘family-oriented’. They report having often been “recruited” in Italy as “staff” or “slaves” for the shops and restaurants of their future husbands (as some women I have interviewed stated). They have been limited in the expression of their subjectivities, with fewer opportunities for education and work outside the family, and for going out and meeting people outside the ‘community’ of Italians. They work in the shop and the house; rarely owning the family business. They haven’t any particular organization, which concerns and protects their interests. Patriarchy still influences their lives. Women of younger generations and of newer waves of migration are still striving to emancipate themselves from oppressive gender roles -and for many of them travelling abroad/migrating is a way of coming to terms with their lack of emancipation, as stated by other interviewees. Considering these women, who in many cases might still have only little proficiency of English and very little apparent choice over their lives, as a subjugated group, would just further their discrimination. Shifting our focus of analysis to the narrative practices, we can see how women in their ‘delimited’ space of action have been very active in expressing and deciding for themselves and their groups. Italian women-mothers are the custodians of family’s memories and have a privileged position as the narrators of the family. They spend more time with their children, as their first acculturating agents. For example one of the women I interviewed remembers how her mother “always spoke of Italy, always. I knew Italy in my mind before I went to Italy, I knew all about the country and the villages, all the little towns around! We grew up knowing a lot about Italian way of life, but of the sort that you don’t worry too much about it, you know! But then I loved go over to mummy, I remember all she said.” Another woman tells of how “also before (her marriage), I was more here at home, with mummy, I helped for lunch, things at home. Women are always more attached to mum”. Moreover the kind of acculturation these women are doing is of the “sort that you don’t worry too much” (as my interviewee puts it), sweet as the lullaby of the night and the fairy tales of the Sundays afternoon, or the memories which women have to dig out from the past to tell their children the lives 103

of ‘before’, those they have always in “the back of their minds” and their children cannot see. Remarkably the first Italian migrants didn’t have as many economic possibilities as they have today, and for many it meant that more than 15 years passed before they went back to Italy for the first time again, therefore they strongly had to relate to Italy through their memories. This role of recollection and narrativisation is a collective act and women can become in their turn strict perpetrators of the limiting rules imposed on them by the patriarchal culture. As an interviewed woman tells: “If something happens to a daughter, the responsibility is of the mother. That’s why. And I am sure that the father has told the mother ‘be careful, don’t let her happen nothing!’. Yeah, I remember daddy to mummy, I remember he telling her, ‘be careful, don’t let her happen anything, that then is your fault! … Then sure that women have more responsibility, and they are more strictly ” (Interview 2, June 2000). Women reclaim some exclusiveness in this role. Men don’t really seem to enter women’s narrative spaces. As an interviewee puts it “Oh our husbands wouldn’t have come at our meetings. They wouldn’t. We’d talked, I don’t know, about baby, children, and food, cooking, they don’t want to hear all that. … If you want to see the food is working out good, and well cooked, you have to, some of the family have to be there, and the women seem to be the one that… yeah… can!”. Thus women are in charge of dealing with emotional encounters with the past and its memories. In so doing they create a reflective (“showing ourselves to ourselves”) and reflexive (“consciousness of ourselves as we see ourselves”, Myerhoff, 1992 :234) ground of expression of their subjectivities and their collective Italian identity. Among simmering pots, ‘the heat on the face’ of the kitchen stoves as they call it, during occasional and informal gatherings, through the chatting about relatives and cooking, about ‘the way it used to be back home’, women manage not only to built networks of support, but also to lead Italians into the annals of their collective memories. This important role is often dismissed under a male biased perspective as futile and meaningless. Yet the memories they can share, the memories they can adapt to their ‘cracked’ existences through their story telling, the memories they can negotiate with mutable circumstances, allow the women to powerfully create a community of identity for the Italians in Ireland. Women’s winding ability to escape subjugation and create spaces of promethean selfempowerment seems to be replicated in the positionality of the entire Italian community in Ireland. The destiny of the Italian diasporic group has a striking parallel with that of the Italian women inside the Italian community in Ireland. Both the Italian women and the Italian community have been othered, silenced, limited in the expression of their identities. Yet they both have been successful in resisting subjugation and finding alternative ground of expressions in hybrid and counter-active forms. The blueprint of gendered strategies have informed the groups’ actions and resources. This is a case that demonstrates once more, not only that women matters in migration phenomena, but they do so in a terrific way.

“And there is a tree in the piazza, just as you come out of the gate, there is a wall, and a big tree, e l’estate when it’s warm, c’é un pò d’ombra e allora tutti si litigano quell quel pezzo d’mbra, chiunque c’é, allora arriva mio fratello, chiappa,chiappa, (and in summertime, there is the tree shadow, and everyone, whoever is there fight for that piece of shadow, and then my brother arrived, he moved back with his parents recently) hallo, my wall, you are only fucking tourists, I am here, ma scherza, (but it’s a joke) I am here all the time, and this is my tree! Yeah, I say to him, how come you miss us now? ‘Cause, since we open the restaurants, I haven’t go back for six weeks and usually six weeks, I’d been in Italy, or two months, and say how come you missed us? You had the tree all to yourself!! (We laugh) No, no, I do love going out and speak. And sit and talk. And you know? I love to talk to older people, when they start telling the old stories, I love it. Like I remember my grandmother, I remember her and I remember grandfather, and I remember my great grand, you know, it’s all this, it’s nice. I love that!” (My interview) 104

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