DIFFERENT VOICES/ROMANIA: Romanians in the State often face the worst prejudice experienced by immigrants, writes Social and Racial Affairs Correspondent Nuala Haughey
Petre Tanase has started serving all-day Irish breakfasts in his Transylvania Romanian Tavern restaurant off Capel Street in Dublin. The €3.99 meals go down well with students from the nearby Bolton Street DIT and Mr Tanase tries to lure people into his cosy establishment with its blood-red walls decorated with folk art and a single icon of Vlad Tepes, better known as Dracula.
It is bold of the restaurateur to put the word Romanian in the name of his restaurant, knowing as he does that immigrants are not flavour of the month in Dublin's north inner city.
Since the mid-1990s, when Romanians began arriving in Ireland in the backs of trailers, the popular image of them has come to be as beggars and petty criminals. But Mr Tanase, who opened the restaurant four years ago, has bags of perseverance in the face of resentment and prejudice. He wasn't deterred when graffiti in the alley outside his premises read "refugees go home".
"I have the courage to keep open this place because people who come here they are very happy. Nobody in four years they give me the food with the plates back."
Today, business at the well-kept restaurant serving home cooking is on the up. Mr Tanase has got to know all the characters in nearby Smithfield fruit and vegetable market, and he calls his favourite Moore Street trader "mama".
Romanians are one of the largest minorities in Ireland, growing from several hundred in the mid-1990s to some 20,000 today. Many have come as asylum-seekers, accounting for one in five of some 44,000 applicants since 1996.
There are several thousand Romanians in Ireland on work permits, while many more are working illegally, either with forged EU identity cards or none at all.
Most Romanian applicants for refugee status have not been successful as they are not fleeing persecution of the type which would allow them be recognised as refugees. What most Romanians are escaping are lives of poverty in a post-communist country bogged down by petty corruption, undergoing faltering political and economic reforms, and making slow progress toward EU membership.
Some Romanians whose asylum claims have failed have been granted residency as parents of Irish-born children, who automatically become citizens. However, this is a practice which the authorities are seeking to curtail, claiming it is being widely abused.
The Romanian population is largely Dublin-based and Romanian Orthodox, with smaller numbers of Catholics and Protestants. There is an organisation called the Romanian Community in Ireland which is run on a voluntary basis with is own website and monthly newsletter, Zori de Zi (Daybreak).
However, the development of a sense of community spirit among Romanians has been hampered both by the innate suspicion many have of each other. This is one of the lasting legacies of a harsh communist regime famed for the ubiquity of its secret police or Securitate. The fact that many Romanians in Ireland have a dubious or temporary legal status also means few have the confidence to involve themselves in community-building.
Mr Romeo Gamulescu (35), from the organisation Romanian Community in Ireland, says a civic sense is slowly growing among fellow nationals here, much of it revolving around churches.
The congregation of the Romanian Orthodox Church has donated €80,000 to build a premises for them. In the meantime, they meet each Sunday in the Catholic church in Belvedere College in north inner city Dublin, bringing with them traditional icons and thin candles.
"OK, maybe you can say some they work illegally, but the thing is they donate to the church instead of sending all their money home," said Mr Gamulescu.
"So I appreciate that they care about the church and the community even though they don't say it loudly. They still believe deep in their hearts about the value of the church."
Mr Gamulescu, a computer software developer currently studying by night at Trinity College Dublin, said funding is a problem for small voluntary groups such as his.
"If you set up an anti-racism campaign or a Romanian asylum-seeker organisation, you get funding. Because we aren't an anti-racist organisation we don't get grants, but if you help a community to integrate it will benefit the whole wider community," he said.
Although few Irish people make the distinction between Romanians and the Roma or Gypsy community, the two groups identify little with each other and interact even less.
The Roma are a traditionally nomadic minority ethnic group who live throughout Central and Eastern Europe, facing widespread discrimination. Most Roma in Ireland come from Romania, although their primary allegiance is to their ethnic group.
Non-Roma Romanians in Ireland tend at best to ignore their Gypsy country people, while the estimated 2,000 Roma here are accustomed to their marginalised status. The high illiteracy levels and poor English skills of many Roma in Ireland suggests they are doomed to repeat the pattern of exclusion from the mainstream in their adopted country.
However, modest efforts are being made to address this isolation. A Roma Support Group has been formed and is affiliated to the Pavee Point Travellers' Centre in Dublin, which provides it with support and a premises.
Mr Gheorge Dancea says the group tries to tell fellow Roma that there is more to life than begging and stresses the importance of language skills for them and education for their children.
"Most of us are residents here and we don't know what we can do legally to open businesses, drive cars or go to work. At the same time we are trying to teach the Roma people to send their kids to school to give them a better chance at life. Many parents didn't go to school and don't know what a school means," he said.
Mr Ovidiu Matuit (38), an engineer, is one of the few Romanians granted refugee status in Ireland, allowing him to live and work here permanently. As a member of the Pro-Transylvania Foundation, which seeks economic and administrative autonomy for the Transylvania region, he says he was threatened by politicians and secret services. "I prefer to leave rather than have a life in my country in jail," he said.
Mr Matuit is articulate and kept himself busy while his case was being processed, giving voluntary talks in schools about being an asylum-seeker.
He used to ask the children what they knew about asylum-seekers, writing their answers on the blackboard. He recounts their responses on his fingers: "Hungry, uneducated, beggars, women came only to give birth here, want to steal jobs, social welfare advantages."
After his talks, their opinions had changed. They would say: "Oops, you are human beings like us. You are not stupid. You are not hungry."
Mr Matuit was in Ireland for almost two years before he was granted refugee status on appeal, having waited for 15 months for his first-stage interview.
While waiting times for processing claims have been substantially reduced, this limbo period is difficult for many asylum-seekers who are not entitled to work.
"The government does not integrate you until you become a refugee," said Mr Matuit. "From their point of view it's correct. From our point of view it's not. If you don't want many asylum-seekers, of course, you don't do much for them."
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