Category: Ireland

Rest in power Christine Buckley – social reformer and fighter

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Ronit Lentin

I was very saddened to hear of the death of Christine Buckley, the Irish-Nigerian woman survivor of Ireland’s gulags – the industrial school system run by religious orders. Christine has been battling with cancer and, in view of her suffering at the hand of the nuns during her childhood, her achievements are more than admirable.

Born in 1946 to a Nigerian medical student and a married Irish woman, Christine spent her childhood in several foster homes before a foster parent put her in the Sisters of Mercy’s Goldenbridge Industrial School, where she, like the other girls, was put to producing rosary beads for the nuns, where she was humiliated, beaten and not given a proper education. In the early 1990s, having survived cervical cancer, Christine decided to track down her parents. Encountering huge difficulties – the nuns were not amenable to share the vital information about her parents with her – she eventually managed to find first her Dublin mother, and then her Nigerian father.

I know quite a bit about Christine, as in 1996 my partner Louis Lentin, having heard an interview Christine had given to the Gay Byrne radio show, made contact with Christine, a meeting that led to the documentary ‘Dear Daughter’ about Christine tracing her parents and her experience in Goldenbridge. We lived with Christine’s story for many months, and when it was screened, ‘Dear Daughter’ had the highest viewing figures for any documentary on RTE, watched by a third of Ireland’s population at the time. Continue reading “Rest in power Christine Buckley – social reformer and fighter”

Roma, racialisation and persecution

,
Ronit Lentin

roma-protest-1
It’s November 5th 2013 and I have just returned from the protest to express solidarity with the Roma and to call for an end to State racism, organised by Anti Racism Network Ireland, the Irish Traveller Movement, and the Ireland branch of the European Network against Racism. It was heartening to see so many people there, yet some of us ‘old’ antiracists, reflected on the déjà vu element: we oldies have been going on such remonstrations since at least 1997, and our first thought was ‘here we go again!’ Now as then a couple of maverick TDs spoke, representatives from various antiracist groups, and representatives of the main racialised group involved – the Dublin Roma – but one wonders how many times more shall we meet holding banners and chanting old reliable slogans… The following are some of my reflections on the most recent incident of racial persecution… here I go again…

When my mother was growing up in a picturesque spa town in northern Romania as part of a thriving Jewish community (most of whom were exiled by the Romanian fascist regime to Transnistria during World War II), she was constantly warned about children-snatching ‘gypsies’. When the family made its way to Palestine in 1940 and stayed for a few weeks in Bucharest, her parents warned her not to go out during what was a pogrom of Bucharest’s Jews – as a blonde, she would be identified as a Jew.  Such are the complexities of the racialisation of Europe’s most persecuted minorities at the time – Roma and Jewish people.

The recent abductions by the Gardai – abduction is the only appropriate term (by the state, not the Roma) – of two blonde Roma children in Dublin and Athlone bring to mind not only the issue of racial profiling, but also the position of Roma people, Europe’s largest ethnic minority, in so-called civilised Europe.

roma-mariaA lot has been written about Roma people in the past weeks resulting from the discovery of three blonde children in Roma families in Greece and Ireland. In all three cases, it was the vigilance of ordinary (racist) members of society that led to the children being removed from their families, in Ireland in total contravention of the Child Care Act. I do not wish to reiterate these cases, even though the injustice in the Irish case is worthy of comment, but rather reflect on the way Roma people epitomise European racism at its crudest. Continue reading “Roma, racialisation and persecution”

Legislate against prostitution

,
Ronit Lentin

I didn’t really want to write about prostitution again. When I did so in 1981, research exposed a horrible world of sexual violation and violence. I didn’t really want to go there again, but was challenged by Patricia Kelleher who did the research for Turn Off the Red Light, the Immigrant Council of Ireland campaign. When articles by women who I had considered feminists started appearing in the press, defending prostitutes’ right to choose to work in the sex industry, and by implication, men’s right to continue to dehumanise and violate women, I felt I could not be silent any more. Reading Rachel Moran’s book, Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (Dublin: Gill and McMillan, 2013), persuaded me to support the demand to fight prostitution by criminalising clients, hence this article. I was going to use Moran’s photograph to illustrate the article, but decided not to objectify her – her words speak for themselves. Please read the book.

To complete the argument, I am also pasting below the Israeli journalist Vered Lee’s article, calling to criminalise clients, not prostitutes.

The proposal by the Oireachtas (Irish houses of Parliament) to adopt the ‘Swedish model’ that seeks to abolish prostitution by criminalising the buyers rather than the sellers of sex, has incurred opposition by several Irish academics. In a recent Irish Times article Dr Eílis Ward of NUI Galway criticised the lack of evidence for this proposal, based on the ‘Turn off the Red Light’ campaign. Her liberal feminist argument that women should be free to be sex workers ignores the violence, coercion and abuse that dominate the sex trade, in Ireland and throughout the world. Prostitution, she argues, without a shred of evidence, cannot be abolished.

Unlike Ward, I did research the topic. In April 1981 Geraldine Niland and I published a two part series in the Irish Times on the lives of real prostitutes in Dublin. We spent several weeks ‘on the beat’ with the women, interviewing many prostitutes and male clients. The women insisted that without clients, prostitution would not exist. Clients came from all walks of life. From married men seeking casual sex on Percy Place on the way home from the pub, to priests whose dog collars on the back seat gave them away, and who the women described as ‘taking from the poor to give to the poor’. Many of the women were abused as children, most had a drug habit and all spoke of their wish to leave prostitution. For most the decision to enter ‘the life’ was a lack of real choice. Most of the women we interviewed would agree with how one of them described herself: ‘you’re dirt, and no good to anyone’. Continue reading “Legislate against prostitution”