In the current debates about immigration into Ireland, the key word is "integration". Pretty much everyone claims to fear a ghettoised society and to see integration as the antidote.
There is one very effective policy for ensuring integration. It is called marriage. Policy-makers may not have heard of it, but lots of people seem to like it. It usually involves a man and a woman being attracted to each other, falling in love and deciding to share their futures. Often, children follow.
Strange as the practice may be, it is hard to eradicate. Vicious sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland has never quite stamped out the bizarre tendency of Protestants and Catholics to fall in love with each other. And paranoid political structures in the Republic have not yet succeeded in stopping people with different skin colours and ethnic origins from being crazy about each other.
Thus it was for Frank Buckley and Juliana Chihumbiri. Frank is a taxi driver in Dublin. He also happens to have done more for integration in Ireland than all the agencies of the State put together.
He runs, as a volunteer, Sport Against Racism Ireland, which has created the context for thousands of people from Irish and immigrant backgrounds to have fun together. It was in the course of his day job, however, that he met Juliana, a black Zimbabwean who came to Ireland on a work permit to work as a translator. One thing led to another and, on August 6th, Frank and Juliana were married in St Stephen's Church in Killiney.
The great day was somewhat soured, however. Juliana has three children from a previous marriage. They live in Harare with Juliana's extended family. Sonia and Sasha are 14 and 12. Sean is 16. In early June, Frank applied to the Department of Justice for holiday visas so that the kids could come to Ireland for the wedding. Sean was to give his mother away and Sonia and Sasha were to be bridesmaids.
Nothing happened. Frantic phone calls as the big day approached elicited no answer from the department. The wedding went ahead without Juliana's children. Three days later, on August 9th, the visa office of the Department of Foreign Affairs sent out three standard letters: "I am sorry to have to inform you that the above-mentioned visa application has not been approved by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform." All queries about the reasons for the refusal were referred to the Department of Justice.
Eventually, after he sought an explanation, Frank received a standard letter on September 6th from the Department of Justice. Attached was a form with 21 possible reasons for refusal. Two of these boxes were ticked. One was: "Obligation to return to home country not shown, eg no social, economic or professional ties in home country." The other, written in gobbledygook, was: "Observe the conditions of the visa, eg the applicant may overstay following his/her proposed visit, or work illegally in the State, or branch into the common travel area."
Each of these is absurd. The children do have social ties in Zimbabwe. They have lived all their lives there. They belong to a prosperous medical family with extensive property in Harare. And the idea that a 12-year-old girl is going to work illegally in Ireland or go off to London to get a job in the black economy is simply stupid. The Department of Justice knew, moreover, that the children were intending to come to Ireland for their mother's wedding to an Irish citizen.
That means that they will ultimately be entitled to settle in Ireland if they want to. Even if there had been some good reason to keep them out of the country, blocking their attendance at the wedding merely delayed the inevitable.
So what is going on here? Nobody can really say. There are no transparent guidelines for the granting of visas in these circumstances, and the Minister for Justice has almost absolute discretion.
The forms with their ticked boxes which purport to provide an explanation are so cursory as to be effectively mute. We are left, then, to ask an ugly question: would the children of an Australian woman marrying her Irish boyfriend in Dublin be refused entry to the country to attend her wedding?
The question, of course, implies an even uglier one: is an unconscious racism at work here? For myself, I don't really know the answer to that question, but I do know someone who thinks the Department of Justice is institutionally racist. In 1998, he wrote: "If an Irish woman marries a black man, he will be treated very differently from a white spouse. He will be routinely halted at airports. He will probably experience great difficulty in securing the right to reside here. At every level . . . the Irish State has a tradition of hard-nosed, red-necked discrimination."
That may be over the top, and it is true that Michael McDowell, who wrote it in 1998, was out of politics at the time. But given that those were his views then, it would be interesting to know how he has acted on them in the meantime.