'Toy thought he was safe here'

Tyrrelstown has been held up as a model of ethnic diversity, but there are concerns that underneath an already thin veneer lies racial unrest, made worse by very poor community facilities and highlighted by last week’s killing of Toyosi Shitta-bey

‘THE FAMILY is not really . . . settled,” said Imam Shehu Adeniji, choosing his words carefully. “When the father is looking at you, he is not seeing you. It will be the same for some time . . . It is not made easier by the fact that this boy . . . was the golden child of the family.”

The father, Segun Shitta-bey, is doing his best to see the world we see. On Good Friday, he lost Toyosi, his ever-smiling, athletically-talented 15-year-old son in a knife attack a few streets from his home. On Tuesday, he went to court to see a 38-year-old Irishman charged with Toyosi’s manslaughter. He suffered strangers to come through his small, crowded house, comforted his five small children, soothed his wife, Bola, almost crazed with grief, and tried to comfort his eldest boy, Sodiq, a normally courteous 22-year-old, now torn between protectiveness, seething silences and angry outbursts.

The family left Lagos, Nigeria, 11 years ago, in search of “peace,” he says, sitting in a small bedroom upstairs, a tiny three-year-old in his arms. Bola, wide-eyed, struggling for breath, grasps at the word “peace” and repeats it as a kind of mantra. “We want Ireland for our home forever. Forever,” says Segun. “The Irish are good . . . In every country , there are good people and bad people. That is how it is all over the world.”

They take me to Toyosi’s bedroom, where the main feature is a huge Lil Wayne poster and an impressive line-up of sports boots beside the bed. Seven pairs, I reckon aloud. Bola looks askance, directing my eye further, under the bed: “Twenty pairs of boots . . . More. More than 20 . . . He had many, many boots, for running and for soccer,” she says brokenly. “He was a happy boy, such a good boy . . . he was my life.” Sodiq lies restlessly on Toyosi’s bed in the tiny room, a young man clearly in need of mental and physical space, faced with yet more intrusion, more loud idolisation of his dead brother.

In the livingroom, full of quietly-spoken visitors, one small table can barely hold the dozen trophies won by Toyosi. The visitors include Sgt Vincent Connolly, the community policing officer from Blanchardstown Garda station, a constant support for the family since the tragedy. Today, says a community leader, they have been working for many hours together to try and arrange the funeral. It has not been easy. Some want to adapt the Muslim ceremonies to make them more accessible for the many young people who want, need, to participate somehow in the farewell to their friend.

But also, the family are reluctant to bury their boy while public figures question whether this was a race crime. They are suspicious. “This whole afternoon, Vincent has been there all the time reassuring, reassuring,” says another community leader.

It is a microcosm of what is happening in the wider community. The palpable anxiety of community leaders to maintain calm among their young men in particular, could be misconstrued as an attempt to minimise the race element. In fact, the leaders are treading on egg-shells, forever playing it down, fearful of fanning the sparks.

Outside Cloverhill District Court on Tuesday – which was attended by about 50 members of the Nigerian community – half a dozen of the younger lads were standing around when a similar number of tattooed white women passed nearby. “Bitch,” murmured one of the lads to nobody in particular. “Don’t you fuckin’ call me a bitch,” a woman began, when an older black man immediately moved the boys away, apologising repeatedly, while a black woman took them sternly to task: “Don’t you ever call a woman that.”

Much emphasis is being placed on the fact that the two Irish brothers charged in connection with the killing are from outside Tyrrelstown. Five of Toyosi’s friends who witnessed the killing are still astonished that it should happen here, of all places.

“Toy thought he was safe here,” said 16-year-old Bobby Kuti. “This is where we live. It’s not like we went to some mad place where we weren’t supposed to go. This is where he got stabbed for whatever reason.”

Among the dozen or so 16- and 17-year-old black boys who turn up in the shopping plaza on Wednesday evening to help distribute flyers and posters for today’s “Never Again” rally, the majority appear to live elsewhere. They often congregate here, ironically, because it “feels safe”, they say. “This is the last place we would expect this to happen. It’s a quiet place,” says one. “It’s like home to us,” says another.

“Tyrrelstown is not like Watts County waiting to explode,” says Joe Higgins, the Socialist party MEP who funded the publicity material for the rally, just as a burly white man wheels up on a bicycle and stops to say he is “so sorry” to the black boys, that he didn’t believe he lived in a racist community.

Most likely, he doesn’t. For now. Despite the shock and devastation of Toyosi’s death, this week Tyrrelstown felt like a calm, orderly place where people live and let live.

Socialist Party councillor Ruth Coppinger, who lives close by and intends to send her daughter to school here, feels it too: “There is no racial tension. This is an exceptional event. This is an aberration. It doesn’t even happen nationally. Tyrrelstown more than any other area has been remarkably united and getting on quite well for a place where more than half the population is classed as non-Irish. It was evident at the vigils. But it has raised issues among the young. They want to make sure: never again. This case has to be pursued to the ultimate. It will probably be a marker of its kind for gardaí.”

Dig a little deeper however, and it’s hard to avoid the sense that this is only an aberration because it is extreme. Someone has died. But the daily reality for many of these people is the low rumble of racism. Older people tend not to complain, but the young are not so reserved. “[Racial abuse] is not a new thing,” says Arnie Manaone (16), a friend of Toyosi. “It happens.”

“Tyrrelstown has no background for this kind of thing,” says a boy stapling a poster, “but you wouldn’t want to go to Cardiffsbridge Rd in Finglas.” His friends murmur vigorous assent.

It rumbles along, the low-grade abuse, perhaps becoming such a familiar background noise that its victims almost cease to notice. Nobody is anxious to give details. Tyrrelstown resident Ignatius Okafor, a thoughtful, cheerful 38-year-old Nigerian, an IT support engineer at Temple St Hospital and former professional footballer who came here from Belgium, says he had his “worst times” from a racist viewpoint, before he arrived in Ireland. “Here? I’ve been called ‘black nigger’ on a bus,” he says wryly.

No-one is immune. The Nigerian Ambassador, Dr Kemafo Nonyerem Chikwe, who lives in leafy Dartry, Dublin 6, woke up early in January to see the word “niggers” painted on her gate pillar.

Glenn Menton, a 16-year-old, white Irish boy from Finglas, who captained the Shelbourne under-15s team on which Toyosi played and who became a close friend of his, speaks animatedly of his friend’s talent and loyalty to the team even after its relegation. But when asked if he finds such racism surprising, he swallows and suddenly looks defeated; his nod – an emphatic no – is more eloquent than any words. Is racism an everyday feature ? He nods sadly again, this time an emphatic yes.

At Toyosi’s funeral, a soccer official remarked that racist comments were reported only last week at a League of Ireland soccer match.

IN ITS LAST REPORT covering the second half of 2008, the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI) noted that black Africans were victims in 42 per cent of the most significant racist incidents in that period. Nearly a third of those involved young people and children. An EU survey in 2008 reported that 94 of every 100 sub-Saharan Africans in Ireland had suffered “serious harassment” at least once in the previous 12 months.

Charlie Cleary, a white Irish Tyrrelstown resident and deeply involved in youth coaching, describes Tyrrelstown as “a lovely place”.

“People all want to integrate. There are a lot of foreign nationals in the GAA.” But he admits that the Irish and non-national groupings are “a bit distanced from one another”.

“There must be 150 nationalities here, but the strange thing is, everyone at a residents’ association meeting is Irish. That’s why you need a community hall. If you want to have any kind of a meeting, you have to go to the hotel and rent a room from the developer, who also owns the hotel.”

After some hesitation, he goes a little further and admits to “some concerns”.

“I’ll be honest. We did say a year back if something wasn’t done in Tyrrelstown fairly quick, something was going to happen. We were worried about kids meeting at the store [a convenience shop with an archway beside it]. There was a bit of anti-social behaviour going on. And you know it only takes one kid to do something to another for it to turn into something that might look like a racist incident. It’s at a low level, but if things are not done, it could get very bad, very quick. See the kids over there outside the shop? Something’s brewing.

“Yes, I am disheartened. It does stir up the tension. It’s in the air, you’d feel it . . . I can’t help thinking if I were living in another country and this was my son, what would I be thinking?”

Dare Adetuberu, the Nigerian-born pastor of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, is acutely aware that this community is on a cusp. More than half of Tyrrelstown’s population of almost 5,000 is classified as “other than white Irish”. The age profile of people in the less than a decade-old development is also unusually young; at one stage, there were at least 18 new births every month in the area. In the 2006 census, there were 548 under the age of 4, and just 15 people aged between 60 and 64.

“There was nothing really to worry about up to Toyosi’s death,” says the pastor. “But we have a sense of being a highly diverse community, one that is not settled, that is going to take a shape or form as it progresses. And rather than allowing it to become the kind of animal that it would become naturally, we want to lead it to become what it should be. The top of our needs, without a shadow of a doubt, is a community centre,” he says. “In five minutes’ time, I am having a meeting of the social integration sub-committee and I still don’t know where it’s going to take place.”

But could better facilities for Tyrrelstown have saved Toyosi’s life? “You couldn’t say for sure that it could have been avoided. He was coming from the Aquatic Centre and they were looking for somewhere for recreation. Some of the group had money, some didn’t. Maybe if we had had a centre for them, somewhere for them to go and meet, that’s where they would have been at that time.”

The familiar truth is that while some thought was clearly put into the streetscape design for this vast development, the promised facilities never materialised. “See where we’re standing,” says Charlie Cleary, gesturing at the shops around us, “this whole area was meant to be a school”.

Thanks to volunteer coaches, there are flourishing soccer and GAA clubs but only with a hut for a clubhouse. “The mix is absolutely brilliant at the GAA, but if a pitch is not provided, it’s going to dissolve,” says Cleary.

“We can’t keep hold of our youth players,” says Ignatius Okafor. “We should have facilities instead of having those boys walking the streets. Tyrrelstown is a lovely place but it is so disappointing. We are blessed with two TDs – Brian Lenihan and Leo Varadkar, but what have they done for the people of Tyrrelstown?”

Alarms have been sounded. In a needs analysis published in March 2008, the consultants noted “an urgent need for community facilities to both meet other service needs but also to assist the fostering of a sense of community”. It also noted that “the ethnic diversity in Tyrrelstown is significant, yet people there are not reporting high levels of racial strife or tension. This feature of the area needs to be capitalised on in order to foster integration for new ethnic minorities in the community. If such a positive exchange could continue in an ongoing way, Tyrrelstown could be a model integrated community.”

At a broader level, a major report on primary schooling in Dublin 15 (including Tyrrelstown), funded by the Department of Education and published in October 2007, suggested that “ghettos” of minority ethnic groups were already emerging in certain parts of the district. “Proactive initiatives now remain the most optimistic approach to avoid the emergence of the kind of polarisation evident elsewhere,” it said. And racism was becoming more evident and anti-racism measures required attention, it added. A year later, the NCCRI was closed down, leaving no expert or independent body to work closely on Garda training programmes or to collate racist incidents that might indicate trends. The purported transfer of the council to the office of the Minister for Integration never took place and the staff were made redundant. Yet, the Government was swift to quote the NCCRI’s achievements in its later reports to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Meanwhile, the quiet work continues. Eoin Brady, Toyosi’s year head at Hartstown Community School, looks across at a big group of lads made up of five nationalities, “including a few Irish hard chaws. But you can see they’re extremely comfortable with lads from Nigeria, Romania, Kazakhstan, Croatia.”

“In no way was Toyosi an academic,” says the teacher with a broad smile, “but, boy, could he do any sport. What I’m so pleased about is that the school facilitated this. Integration is taking place slowly. The thing we need to ask are the resources there to integrate them properly? Do we recognise the job these schools are doing?”

At Toyosi’s graveside, Imam Shehu Adeniji showed no complacency. Asking people not to protest today, he said, “We are worried about where it might lead.”

SPORTING ROLE TOYOSI AND SOCCER

THE ROLE that football played in the tragically short life of Toyosi Shitta-bey was reflected in the Uefa "Respect" flag that was placed on his coffin.

After just a couple of years playing organised football, he was included in the Shelbourne under-15 squad. He was first spotted playing at a tournament in Phoenix Park and joined Insaka-Ireland, the club for children from Africa, just two years ago.

"They were all street footballers when they started," recalls Frank Buckley, of Sport Against Racism Ireland (Sari). "Toyosi had a good head on him and very good vision. He was a bit light, but he would have bulked up. He definitely had potential."

Toyosi is the public face of a quiet revolution in Irish soccer which is already filtering through to the Irish under-age set-up.

At least four of the under-16 Irish squad which participated in a tournament in Portugal were players of African origin.

Former Ireland manager Brian Kerr, who is involved with Sari (sari.ie), said he first stressed the importance, for both footballing and cultural reasons, of recruiting the children of new immigrants when he was technical director of the Football Association of Ireland. "I explained to them that there was an opportunity to include these players," he says. "They can become role models for children of similar backgrounds and put it up to people who think it is okay to have racist tendencies.

"There is consistent racism in this country despite what people might have you believe."

Ronan McGreevy