A friend told me today about a poor Roma woman here in Cavan who has been forced to scavenge in dust-bins for food and clothes. Being a true witness to her Christian religion, my friend undertook to give her some clothes, after she overcame the language barrier and realised what she wanted. The response of other Cavan people was not so generous or so Christian. A nice, self-satisfied couple were dismissive of my friend’s efforts, sneering that the woman was probably a Moslem. Now I thought that the attitude, so dear to Ireland’s clerico-fascists, which equated dark skin with heathenism or paganism had disappeared long ago. Let’s not forget its tragic consequences, as when a number of Irish volunteers in Franco’s army during the Spanish Civil War came upon some members of General Millan Astray’s Moroccan soldiers. These were dark=skinned, and the good Irish blueshirts naturally thought they must be Godless communists: they couldn’t be fighting for faith and fatherland and yet not be shite. So they fired on them. The Moors returned fire, but unlike the Irish boys who had probably never shot anything more than a few rabbits or some pigeons the troops from North Africa were combat-hardened soldiers who rarely missed when they took aim. As a result quite a number of the Irish blueshirt volunteers in Spain died as a result of “friendly fire.”
No one’s sure how many Roma died in Hitler’s concentration camps. Estimates differ between one and two million. Certainly over twenty thousand were exterminated in one day at Auschwitz. But our hostility to the Roma is predictable given our prejudice towards our own travellers – our very own ethnic minority whom we can feel self-righteous about discriiniating against. The problem is they aren’t an ethnic minority; they’re not members of a different ethnic group but our close relatives.
Prejudice often stems from a need to pretend to be superior to other people, especially if deep down those who are prejudiced sense their own inadequacy. Whenever I hear a racist remark I feel sick. I also feel unclean, as if my personal space has been sullied. One of the reasons I am so much against racism and xenophobia is because I am disabled. I know that the prejudice and hostility directed against migrant workers or people of different skin colours or sexual minorities or any other handy group could be turned on the disabled. Such hostility already exists and is acted upon in Ireland, and in this county even. Those who are guilty of it are public bodies such as the County Council. What makes this prejudice different is that it is rarely ennunciated in words, but rather through actions, and indeed those who do it are often pledged (albeit hypocritically) to help the disablled, but I will leave exposure of these cowardly dwarves for another time.
It does my heart good to know there are good people in this world and in this town who are not touched by evil and a desire to do other people down.
