Cassandra Voices

Tag: question

  • On the Question of Immigration

    The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is perhaps best understood as the culmination of the Enlightenment tradition of constitutionalism, hedged in legalistic language of proportionality and balance. It asserts that people have a right – or at the very least the right to have rights – to rely on the Convention when a domestic state has been derelict.

    It has been invoked successfully on many occasions against Ireland, most obviously with Mary Robinson’s enlistment by David Norris in 1990 to establish his right to privacy in terms of the criminalisation of homosexuality, in circumstances where the Irish domestic Supreme Court decided against him. That challenge fell within the rubric of Article 8 of the Convention: respect for your private and family life.

    The prohibition against torture and inhumane and degrading treatment under Article 3 of the Convention has protected Irish people in the infamous H Block 5 techniques case Ireland v U.K. (1979).

    Using the same Article 3, the ECHR sanctioned the rogue police state in the Greek case of The Regime of The Colonels (1966), and multiple human rights cases for the actions of various police forces not least in Turkey – referred to in a recent Cassandra Voices Podcast and article. It is noticeable that it has been extended to mental suffering, including demonisation by race. With ever more advanced techniques of torture, abuse and degrading treatment that extension was a jurisprudential necessity.

    A new podcast and article discuss fresh crackdowns targeting the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, with Fatima Akman Lehmann joining Luke Sheehan.https://t.co/nQzOJ3bxCP

    — CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) January 3, 2026

    The track record of Ireland’s noncompliance does not make for pretty reading, not least the Norris Case. In many recent cases, given the fractured incorporation of the Convention, we have witnessed the development of the sinister interpretative obligation where the Convention is ignored if a constitutional principle applies, however dubiously, or as in the recent cases of Quirke and Dwyer, where the Irish courts used police powers and data protection to sidestep the Convention and thus entirely undermine its legal application.

    Along with others, historically we have been a rogue state in Convention compliance terms, and contrary to the view of Gerard Hogan our Constitution is a paltry substitute, not least given the diminution of Due Process by the Irish judiciary, which, in fairness, Hogan sedulously opposes.

    Now, with Minister for Justice O’ Callaghan leading the way, a joint statement of The Council of Europe calls for Article 8 of the ECHR, which protects the right to a family life, to be ‘adjusted so that more weight is put on the nature and seriousness of the offence committed and less weight is put on the foreign criminal’s social, cultural, and family ties with the host Country.’

    It also call for the crucial Article 3 to be ‘constrained to the most serious issues in a manner which does not prevent State Parties from taking proportionate decisions on the expulsion of foreign criminals, or in removal or extradition cases.’

    The joint statement also stresses the importance of ‘a states’ right… to control the entry, residence, and expulsion of foreigners from their territories, which should guide the interpretation of the Convention.’

    Image: Matt Barnard

    Vexed Question of Our Age

    Immigration has been the vexed question of our age, and the use of the word foreigner in the above statement is a deeply divisive word. There should be no such expression allowed in any language, only people. None of us are pure blood. The word “foreigner” in this context is meaningless.

    My experience of the ludicrous Irish refugee tribunal system was that the vast preponderance of claims were rejected, and if a tribunal chair had the temerity to admit to more than a minuscule amounts of claims he or she would be removed. The Cosma case (2006) – involving suicidal ideation – I litigated with Gerard Hogan in the High and Supreme Courts sidestepped Article 2 of the convention, in circumstances where there were tangible psychological reports. English tribunals are better but increasingly restrictive, albeit educated English judges tend to respect the Convention.

    In the Irish system I encountered judgments of monumental absurdity, involving ill-informed credibility assessments.

    It should be born in mind that many of those who seek asylum have been falsely convicted or framed by state criminals. Turkey comes to mind. When someone is accused by criminals of being a criminal the term loses any meaning.

    In all this the lessons of history and the reason why the Convention was founded are lost. Let us consider, therefore, given my mixed Austrian-Irish heritage, the respective experiences of forced or compulsory immigration in both these countries.

    In some cases, as in that of legendary Austrian-Jewish writers such as Joseph Roth, Stevan Zweig and indeed the very elderly Sigmund Freud forced migration was a consequence of real or prospective political persecution, and what is known as non-refoulement is a central part of immigration law, which is a well-founded fear of political persecution.

    That was during the last epoch of real barbarism. It’s clear that we are now returning to similar depravities, as the gyres of history turn.

    Apart from writers and intelligentsia who were often thoroughly disenchanted with the place, most of those leaving the country have done so for economic reasons. In more recent times, if not always, we have been welcomed into the U.K. and U.S.. Sadly, we no longer live in a world that extends a welcome to the poor huddled masses. And despite others welcoming the Irish, apart from welcoming tourists and accommodating multinationals, we have never really been the land of a thousand welcomes.

    Sideshow and Deflection

    The immigration issue is in fact a sideshow and deflection, where fag end capitalism foments hatred and discord, turning people against each other. It is often used to deflect attention from governmental inaction in housing and substantive equality matters.

    The Irish approach seems to be move immigrants down the canal, or use Gastarbeiter who pay exorbitant fees to shady educational institutions, but keep refusing them settled status.

    In a separate initiative O’Callaghan has a point about working immigrants contributing to accommodation costs, and no doubt family reunification issues do require careful consideration, especially with respect to the costing of whether those who come in can be supported by family members, but any denudation of Article 3 opens up a dangerous vista.

    Violent demonstrations and attacks on particular nationalities suggest that Irish parochialism and indeed racism have reached unprecedented levels. This is also the case in the rest of Europe and the UK. Let us consider the larger context.

    First published in 1918, and translated into English in 1926, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was perhaps the most influential text of the 1930s. Spengler  blamed what he saw as a declining European civilisation on the dilution of a mythical Aryan race – whether Germanic or Anglo Saxon. Spengler influenced Hitler and provided an ideological impetus for the extermination of undesirable races in the Holocaust or Shoah.

    Moreover, our age of chaos and uncertainty allows strongman leaders like Viktor Orban (whose Hungary signed this document) to assert as policy demonization of the other. If you listen carefully enough you will recognise that the Social Darwinism of another age is also the rallying cry of neo-liberalism, as an age of cartels and select groups brings exclusion and enforced conformity against others.

    It hardly matters to racists, who do not believe in science or empirical evidence, that there is zero evidence for the concept of race, as geneticists have worked out that every person on Earth can trace a lineage back to a single common female ancestor – a Mitochondrial Eve – who lived around 200,000 years ago.

    Franz Fanon

    Reproducing Colonialism

    Who is not a foreigner and what the hell does that mean? In works such as Culture and Imperialism (1994) and Orientalism (1978) Edward Said argued that ‘Patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious and racial hatreds can lead to mass destructiveness.’ He also cites our very own Conor Cruise O’Brien to the effect that Imagined Communities of identity are hijacked by the petty dictators of state nationalism.

    Meanwhile, Frantz Fanon’s seminal anti-colonial text The Wretched of the Earth (1961) demonstrates how the indigenous population is required to pay the debts of the occupying powers.

    This is now being reproduced in our own societies in the form of austerity. The occupying powers are now the corporatocracy, or those with inherited wealth. The only difference from the colonial period is they no longer exclusively come from a distinct ethnic group. In fact, a veneer of diversity is achieved with the promotion of a few specimens with varied pigmentation. Leo Varadkar comes to mind. As long as they embrace safe, politically correct policies that ignore structural racism they become one of us.

    What Fanon said is true both of former colonialism and now internal colonialism by corporate vulture and hedge funds with politicians as puppets: ‘The people’s property and the people’s sovereignty are to be stripped from them.’

    Furthermore, with respect to the assault on Article 3, certain Irish nationals might nativistically welcome this without understanding that its denudation, in conjunction with the already denuded due process, ushers in the potential Article 3 violation of Irish citizens in Ireland.

    We are on a slippery slope to a larger police state.

    The previous site of the heavy gang on Harcourt Street may already be equipped with physical and newly given psychological torture techniques derived from American institutions. Be careful what you wish for citizens.

    Thus we find an increasing differentiation between ‘them’ and ‘us’, involving unedifying forms of class warfare and demonization of those outside the dominant culture, whether foreigner, migrant or displaced. ‘Killing an Arab’, the central theme of expurgation of ‘the other’ in Albert Camus’s L’ Étranger is now writ large in our culture.

    Camus, in my view the greatest writer, humanist and intellect of the 20th Century with his Shakespearean mixed-race native ambivalence is a ghostly prophet of the way we live now.

    Well before fascism there was of course widespread hatred of the wandering and or wealthy jew. The rebranding of Herzog Park in Dublin might be part of a resurgent anti-Semetism. Why not rebrand it Wittgenstein Park, after one of the great intellects of the 20th century, who is merely awarded a humble plaque in the Aishling Hotel.

    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards
    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards

    End of an Era

    We are seeing a growing hostility towards miscegenation, mixed marriages and corruption of bloodlines. Members of the blue-blooded, ‘Anglo-Norman’, Fine Gael party display an absurd sense of entitlement, while many Fianna Fáil members appear to be card-carrying racists, while a vigilante Catholic Right inveighs against alleged paedophiliac Asian men, while ignoring the litany of its own abuses.

    All is not lost in Britain, though the rise of Tommy Robinson and co does not augur well. Even in the polyglot cosmopolis – the ultimate melting pot that is London – the sense is that multicultural tolerance has been eroded substantially, and is being replaced by fractious intolerance, racism, class warfare, intimidation and social fragmentation.

    The Post Second World war humanist consensus is almost gone.

    The words of Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in Brazil after fleeing Hitler’s Europe are returning to haunt us: ‘I feel that Europe, in its state of degeneracy has passed its own death sentence.’

    Feature Image: Syrian and Iraqi migrants arriving in Lesbos, Greece, in 2015 seeking refuge.

  • Donal Fallon’s Burning Question

    Deities or daimons held strong associations with the cities of Classical Rome and Greece, projecting how freemen, and sometimes women, wished to represent their civic virtues. Thus Athena, the patron god of Athens, combined an association with crafts such as weaving and valour on the battlefield.

    The gods of Antiquity yielded to saints or angels in Europe in the Christian era. The twelfth century, Archbishop Lorcán Ó Tuathail is the patron saint of Dublin. He began the construction, in stone, of Christchurch Cathedral and was renowned for making peace between warring groups. Mediating between competing factions to produce lasting building stock might not be the worst attribute to find in a contemporary civic champion.

    Architects are the most obvious authors of cities. The skyline of Dublin is indebted – or otherwise depending on your view – to the varied talents of Gandon, Scott and Stephenson. Craftsmen and builders are generally forgotten, although some see the hidden patterns of freemasonry, while street names still bear the names of the first developers – notwithstanding post-independence re-branding.

    At a deeper level it has been writers, musicians and visual artists that have forged a distinctive consciousness among the inhabitants of the bricks and mortar of Dublin city. Historians, too, have helped impart an essence of place, by joining past and present, lest we forget…

    Donal Fallon is a very modern historian who has used new technology to excellent effect throughout his career, while retaining a commitment to the craft: engagement with sources primary and secondary, and reflections on the role of history and historians. Unusually among his peers, he approaches a mainstream audience without indifference.

    His latest work, Three Castles Burning: A History of Dublin in Twelve Streets (New Island Books, 2022) cleverly uses twelve street as a window on an array of historical episodes, and personalities, which touch on contemporary concerns, notably a housing crisis.

    Numerous themes are explored throughout the book, perhaps most evident is an enduring tension between preservation and development: ‘All cities must develop and grow’, he writes, ‘The balance of development is key’ (p.2). This extends to reconciling an alluring multiculturalism with the cultural distinctiveness of the native-born population.

    Housing

    The first street Fallon surveys is Henrietta Street, the impressive early Georgian terrace that was reduced to squalid tenement-dwellings over the course of the nineteenth century. It found an unlikely champion in the shape of a veteran Republican architect and planner Uinseann MacEoin (1920-2007), who unlike many of his comrades, admired the city’s Anglo-Irish architectural inheritance.

    Henrietta Street also offers a vantage on nearby Henrietta House, one of a number of schemes designed by Dublin Corporation Housing Architect Herbert George Simms (1898-1948). His signature rounded corners and communal courtyards demonstrate that social housing need not necessarily succumb to brutalist functionality.

    In the following chapter on Watling Street, Fallon recalls a 1939 speech by Simms before a Housing Enquiry in City Hall: ‘housing of the working classes would have to be accepted sooner or later as a permanent service, like water or other municipal services.(p.36)’ Simms would surely have despaired at the subsequent financialisation of property led by his countrywoman Margaret Thatcher. Sadly, overwork drove him to suicide.

    Watling Street also allows Fallon to explore the origins of the Liffey Swim, immortalised in the painting of that name by Jack B. Yeats, ‘a piece of work … ingrained in the mind of the city’(p.49).

    Remarkably, women were only permitted to compete for the first time in 1991, seemingly in response to the demands of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid (1895-1973), who maintained that ‘mixed athletics and all cognate immodesties are abuses that right-minded people reprobate, wherever and whenever they exist(p.50).’

    ‘Disturbed Pits’

    A wander down Fishamble Street allows Fallon to transport us to Viking Dublin and also to the controversy over the development of Wood Quay, which became the site for the Dublin City Council offices. As the poet and campaigner against the development Thomas Kinsella put it: ‘Disturbed pits and drains trickled with unease.’

    Fallon takes a characteristically measured stance, arguing that Sam Stephenson’s buildings ‘are an important part of the built heritage of the city … Alas, if only they had been built at less contested sites, we could appreciate them more fully(p.71).’

    Rathmines Road Lower brings Fallon to the affluent suburbs beyond the canals. Rathmines became a staunchly Unionist enclave after becoming a township through an Act of Parliament in the early nineteenth century.

    One contrarian resident of Rathmines prior to independence was Francis Sheehy Skeffington, who was murdered by a deranged British Officer during the 1916 Rising. The social campaigner and pacifist adopted the label of crank with pride. ‘A crank, according to Skeffy, was a small instrument that makes revolutions(p.87).’

    A look at South William Street allows Fallon to enter the legendary hostelry of Grogan’s or The Castle Lounge, which he commends as ‘one of the few pubs in the city continuing to shun unwanted modernity in the lives of drinkers and conversationalists(p.111).’ The pub also holds the distinction for being one of the few in the city during the 1960s to serve unaccompanied women.

    Fallon seems less than impressed with Lovin’ Dublin proclaiming the street to be at the heart of ‘the Hipster Triangle’ and christening it ‘without doubt the hippest street in the city. P.115)’ ‘Such hollow titles can change quickly’ Fallon acerbically notes. Perhaps he would like to see this occur sooner rather than later, which might make it easier to secure a seat in the aforementioned hostelry.

    Next up on Fallon’s tour is Parnell Street East, described as Chinatown on Google Maps. Fallon appears to bridle at the suggestion that the Tech giant should be bestowing the title. He seems more inclined to the Vietnamese food on offer, allowing him to recall the arrival of Vietnamese Boat people in Dublin from 1979 onwards.

    Up to Monto

    Fallon points to ‘a special irony in the renaming of James Joyce Street, formerly Mabbot Street … after a client of Monto (p.137).’ Monto – an area to the east of what is now O’Connell Street – which was Dublin’s notorious red light district, where prostitution was on very public display.

    The city’s notoriety was perhaps deserved. Fallon reveals that in 1870 there were 3,255 arrests for prostitution in the city, compared to just 38 in Belfast, while in London the figure stood at 2,163 (p.141).

    However, the religiously-inspired clearances after independence did little to ameliorate the situation, as Ronan Sheehan recalls In Dublin: The Heart of the City, ‘The unfortunate women did not have reputations to lose. They simply moved elsewhere.’

    Ship (a corruption of Sheep) Street, leads Fallon to engage with the suffragette protests on that street in 1912, when ‘windows belonging to the Castle at Ship Street were smashed by members of the Irish Women’s Franchise League (p.163).’

    Also, a nineteenth century resident Giuseppe Cervi ‘is widely credited with opening Dublin’s first fish and chip shop (p.171)’ emphasising the long history of immigrants broadening Dubliners’ paletes, and perhaps their waistlines.

    Divisions

    Church Street was the site of a tenement collapsing in 1913 – inspiring such an incident in Joseph Plunkett’s novel Strumpet City – as well as Dublin’s worst industrial accident in 1878, which claimed fourteen lives.

    Fallon also explores class divisions in Dublin, where ‘traditionally the Liffey itself has been thought of, rightly or wrongly, as a dividing line.’ However, he recalls that ‘there was a time when East-West was a better way of thinking of such things’, adding, in parenthesis, ‘and perhaps it is once more (p.181).’

    At least progress was made after independence with housing. The 1911 census revealed that some 63% of the city were working class, of whom 45% lived in tenement accommodation. It was estimated that some 37,500 Dubliners were ‘housed in dwellings so decayed as to be on the borderline of unfitness for human habitation.’

    Eustace Street in Temple Bar is a notable flash point in terms of the balance of development and preservation. Indeed, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern once declared that this could be Ireland’s answer to the West Bank.

    More prosaically, the former Dublin City Council planner Paul Kearns argued ‘Dublin has, for far too long, favoured the temporary, often fleeting visitor, over the local urban resident(p.204).’

    Before getting its touristic makeover, Temple Bar was slated for destruction, to be replaced with a bus station. ‘In acquiring the property with the eventual aim of demolition, the bus company began leasing out units at low rents,(p.204)’ which brought a host of artist studios, cutting edge music venues and off-beat retailers.

    Fallon observes that ‘Temple Bar today may not bring ‘neo-bohemian’ to mind, but a surprising array of institutions from that moment of great optimism remain in the district.’ He also lauds ‘the brilliant Meeting House Square(p.205).’

    The penultimate street Fallon considers is Pearse Street (to Westland Row), site of Pearse Street Garda Station, once home to the counter-revolutionary G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Fallon reveals that the name ‘G’ is simply ‘the seventh letter of the alphabet and these men formed the seventh division(p.226)’ of the DMP.

    Pearse Street was formerly known as Great Brunswick Street, before being re-named in honour of Patrick Pearse the leader of the 1916 Rising, who was born on 27 Great Brunswick Street.

    James Pearse, Patrick’s father, was ‘a Unitarian raised in England [who] … specialised in ecclesiastical and architectural sculptures.’ Patrick fondly wrote of his father’s work, which can be seen in churches across the city: ‘If ever in an Irish church you find, amid a wilderness of bad sculpture, something good and true and lovingly finished you may be sure that it was carved by my father or by one of his pupils.(p.242)’

    Finally, to Moore Street, where Fallon again explores the competing aspiration of breathing new life into an impoverished area and preserving the famous open-air market, along with sites of the 1916 Rising. Fallon wonders whether some kind of ‘proper market’ could prosper on the street in future (p.269).

    Outsiders

    From its foundation as a slave market by Viking raiders Dublin has had a fraught relationship with the rest of the island. The nickname Jackeen is a term of derision applied to ‘West Brit’ Dubliners, who enthusiastically welcomed Queen Victoria with the Union Jack.

    Donal Fallon’s account reminds us that Dublin has long been subject to the ebb and flow of migration, whether Norman, English, Huguenot, Italian, Vietnamese or Chinese. As capital and main entrepot it became an important political, commercial and cultural hub from the seventeenth century. This engendered enduring civic pride, that can spill into arrogance, breeding resentment in rural Ireland, a sentiment which often persists even among those who have made it their long-term home.

    The stereotype of a true Dub is one who regards a cow pat with horror, and any beverage other than a pint of plain with deep suspicion. But such rare specimens now generally feel a profound alienation in a city increasingly dominated by office blocks, hotels and cafes. Dublin is a city of outsiders.

    Today most long- and short-term residents of Dublin don’t live in the city proper – generally considered to be the area between the canals –  but in the sprawling suburbs. Many of us who grew up there are never quite sure where we fit in. Perhaps Donal Fallon will deign to explore this unglamorous hinterland in a subsequent work.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini