Remarkable and relatively rare good timing saw RTE Radio 1's main documentary slot occupied by a highly relevant programme last Thursday. In a week when this newspaper reported on how the Department of Justice is turning the screws on refugees, we heard Anne-Marie Power's excellent In Search of Refuge.
The issue of refugees in Ireland has not exactly gone unreported this year, and for the first few minutes of In Search of Refuge it was not entirely clear that anything but sound and a little bit of fury was going to be added to the frequently heard but shallow debate.
For example: there, again, was Nadette Foley speaking reasonably about the scale (small) and timing (late) of the "crisis" in a European context. The presence of Power's own voice, so appropriate in other work by her, seemed to lighten this programme unhelpfully - she sounds so young and lacking in authority compared to, say, Marian Finucane, whose Liveline immediately preceded it. Even the underlying message sounded like old news. Essentially, we seemed again to be hearing about the two categories of refugees: those genuinely fleeing terrible persecution, and those who are here to "sponge off our system" - as an immigration officer said to Power.
However, while the programme never completely transcended these flaws, the listener began to sense that the issue is not as simple as that. Firstly, we heard how dry that sponge is, how gladly refugees would cast it aside and fend for themselves if they were allowed. Sure, the safety net in Ireland may look good compared to that in Nigeria, but how much better it would be if they had a job in this Celtic Tiger economy. Instead, they live difficult lives in a state of suspension.
The strength of this programme, in the end, was that Power did what very few journalists have bothered to do: she got microphones under refugees' noses and brought us, at length, a sense of the real texture of their experiences, here and at home. The sense of wrenching dislocation was palpable; even the fact that many refugees have gone to Ennis, Co Clare - which has a long history of welcoming asylum-seekers from Shannon Airport - gave them a sense both of agency and tragedy that utterly gives the lie to the "sponger" image. One irony, wholly unintended I'm sure, is that some refugee tales actually sustain local prejudice about the savagery of foreign places. One African man told Power that he was escaping from a vicious, all-encompassing cult that practices blood sacrifices and insisted on the genital mutilation of his daughter. Perhaps Irish racists will be mollified if they come to believe that immigration is an extension of the civilising mission that Ireland has long claimed to bring to the "Third World".
This column generally avoids discussing a programme before it has gone out on the airwaves, but on the basis of a cassette, I can safely say that Sheila O'Callaghan's Go- ing Back for Good (RTE Radio 1, this Thursday) is an extraordinary documentary and a perfect companion piece for In Search of Refuge.
Indeed, listeners who are ready to have their minds stimulated about the reality of migration have a great opportunity this week: In Search of Refuge is repeated tomorrow evening, then Going Back for Good goes out in the usual Thursday afternoon slot. O'Callaghan's Mum and Dad are Ireland's economic migrants. They left the west of Ireland a half-century ago as teenagers, settling in England, but nurturing their identity by sending the kids to Granny in Mayo each summer. Now, having seen their children "return" to Ireland, they're selling up their four-bed in Nottingham to go back to the Ould Sod. But this truly wonderful programme doesn't settle for any simplicities. Dad still talks like a Roscommon man, hates the city and dreams of home - but he turns his years of work as agricultural labourer in the English midlands into a sort of pastoral idyll. When he and Sheila drive out to revisit the farm where he dug spuds for decades, it seems this is really his dream place; indeed, talking to the English farmer, he plays down the charms of Ireland, and the move suddenly sounds much more tentative.
Meanwhile, Mum revisits the mansion where she came to work as a servant at age 17. Serendipitously, the mansion, like her own home, is up for sale, so she walks its vast halls, rings its bells and stands in the tiny room she occupied. She, too, has lived a romance of sorts right here: when her employers were out, she recalls, she and another Irish maid would open the vast closet of evening gowns, dress up and waltz around the hall.
"Ireland did her no favours," O'Callaghan concludes about her Mum. "but that's not to say she loves the country any less. As for her two parents, and their prospects back home: "I don't believe they have romantic illusions - just a sense of where they belong . . ." Listeners to this gem of a programme will hope she's right.
