Rest in power Christine Buckley – social reformer and fighter

,
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”

Australia: asylum and art

,
Ronit Lentin

This is not a story about art depicting the asylum process, or about asylum seekers making art, but rather about the sinister connection between art sponsorship and the provision of detention services, or more specifically, about the close, and abhorrent, link between the Sydney Biennale and its founder patron, Transfield Services (Australia).

The Biennale of Sydney, to be held this year between March 21 and June 9 2014, is an international festival of contemporary art, held every two years. It is the largest and best-attended contemporary visual arts event in Australia and, alongside the Venice and São Paulo biennales and Documenta, it is one of the longest running exhibitions of its kind and was the first biennale to be established in the Asia-Pacific region.

Since 2010, Transfield Services (Australia) has held a series of contracts for ‘Garison and welfare services’ with the Australian Government’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection totalling over $340 million. Since 2013 it has a further series of contracts: in February 2013 for $175 million, and another interim contract announced in January 2014 whose scope extends beyond providing services by Transfield for the Melbourne and Nauru detention centres to the refugee detention centre located on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Put simply, Transfield’s involvement in migration detention has massively expanded in both dollar terms and scope from humble beginnings of around $40,000 for grounds maintenance in the Melbourne detention centre, to contracts valued over $1bn, and Transfield is set to become the major contractor of Australia’s offshore detention centres. On 24 February 2014 it was announced thatTransfield has been granted a further contract to run maintenance, catering and security services in Manus Island and Nauru in a $1.2 bn deal in the midst of heightened public awareness of offshore detention. Thus, Transfield is clearly benefiting hugely from Australia’s Tony Abbott’s draconian policy of detaining asylum seekers off shore. Continue reading “Australia: asylum and art”

The absurdity of asylum in Israel

,
Ronit Lentin

asylum-seekers-marchLast December some 200 African asylum seekers started a march from the open detention centre Holot in the south of the country towards the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem. ‘We are not afraid to march, sun, rain or snow. We’ll march to Jerusalem to ask the government for our rights. We can no longer stay in this prison’, said Masala, a young Eritrean marcher. After two days of marching in rough weather conditions, supported by Israeli human rights groups, they were all arrested and returned to the Saharonim jail, where the conditions are harsher.

Altogether some 53,000 asylum seekers, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan, live in Israel. Most have reached Israel through Egypt after a harrowing journey. Most have arrived from areas where massacres, murders, civil wars and political persecution are daily occurrences. In Israel, however, they are not called asylum seekers, but rather ‘infiltrators’ – a term harking back to the 1950s when Palestinian refugees, expelled from Israel during and after the 1948 war, attempted to get back to their homes and lands and were prevented from doing so. Continue reading “The absurdity of asylum in Israel”