Well within living memory, the public uproar about the fightin’, drunken Irish in Britain reached such a pitch that when magistrates were given the power to order the deportation of Commonwealth citizens, the 1962 Act included the Republic of Ireland – despite the fact that Irish citizens weren’t even classified as aliens under UK law.
About 8 per cent of prisoners in England and Wales were Irish-born then, compared with just 2 per cent of the general population. Of course the Irish authorities were unhappy about the new Act because they needed returning rackety deportees like a hole in the head. The rich irony was that it was only due to a kind of mutual understanding with Irish judges – ie jail or England – that many had fled there in the first place.
We were always the masters of hypocrisy in the stories we tell ourselves. Three years after the Act, 60 per cent of all deportation orders were Irish. Even then there was probably a smattering of high-minded Irish who revelled in the deportations of their compatriots back to a godforsaken country with less than nothing to offer them. But never in our wildest dreams could we have envisioned how so many, 60 years on, would gloat over an Irishman’s planned deportation from the US. From living saint to pariah in less than a week is a swift trajectory even by Irish standards. No more than the British deportees before him, Seamus Culleton is no poster boy for the cause. But how did we get from demanding special treatment for him to hanging judge in a blink? How many Irish families can honestly claim that no member ever vanished into the diaspora for murky reasons rooted in a feckless youth?
Culleton outstayed his 90-day visa and had little hope of outrunning US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (Ice) or US law – even under a fair-minded judge who admonished Ice for mistakes “that muddy the record and undermine faith in the system”.
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That the judgment contained no mention of Irish bench warrants issued nearly two decades earlier must have been disappointing for the compatriots so pleased to see him fall foul of Ice – a service in the very public business of snatching, beating and shooting even solidly legal US citizens on the streets, then denying the irrefutable evidence. Some even said online that they hoped Culleton’s alleged abnegation of family responsibilities, reported in another newspaper, might be brought to the attention of that same great moral authority. That missed the entire point of many people’s concerns – including political leaders who were using notably careful language.
It wasn’t about US law catching up with him; it was the brutal conditions of deprivation and abuse under which Culleton and tens of thousands including small children are being detained. The Trump administration, supposedly targeting “the worst of the worst” is treating the detention itself as a criminal punishment. Cruelty is the point; the tool to pressure people into leaving the country. The excuse offered by eager regime defenders is that in rounding up the worst of the worst, a wider range of people will inevitably be caught in the net. They are just collateral damage (shrug). Since autumn, US courts have ruled 4,400 times that Ice has jailed people illegally, according to Reuters. Of all Ice arrests in the past year, less than 14 per cent – aka “the worst of the worst” – had a violent criminal history; 40 per cent had no criminal record at all.
Culleton at 38 is a long way presumably from the wild drinking 20-year-old youth who allegedly discarded 25 ecstasy pills – allegedly for sale or supply – while being arrested by gardaí in 2008, and skipped 2009 bench warrants for that and two alleged counts of criminal damage, to flee to the US. Two years before that, I was in the US to interview what were then known as Irish illegals in an atmosphere of growing toxicity about immigration. This paper had carried an opinion piece by Trina Vargo of the US-Ireland Alliance arguing that in Ireland’s then-boom conditions Irish illegals were not a special case and that any special deal would foment division between the huge numbers of Hispanics and much smaller Irish-American communities. In Ireland – where there was still empathy with migrants – the piece attracted an overwhelmingly critical response.
Haunting stories on the ground there – the kind we glide over so easily now that we have an immigrant population of our own – included an ambitious, hard-working Donegal couple then into their 15th year as undocumented with two small children, stranded like legal ghosts, unable to leave the Bronx, get a driving licence or a mortgage. The sirens were urging them to return to boomtime Ireland but the husband didn’t trust them. In New York there would always be work even as a delivery boy, he reckoned.
Within a few months, Ireland’s bubble had burst catastrophically. By 2009, when a young Culleton fled this grim, despairing country for the US, numbers employed in construction here had already dropped by 36 per cent and for the Irish it was emigration once again.
That’s not the story we tell ourselves now of course, as we fashion a new narrative wrapped in complacency, arrogance and a false sense of security. Our Mikey in Minneapolis will be grand because he would never do what Culleton did. We can turn on a dime, demanding special treatment for (some of) our own while enacting laws such as the International Protection Bill – currently before the Dáil – that are all about ejecting immigrants with greater speed and efficiency.
We should be careful what we wish for – because there will be a next time.
