As a result of their abortive Ballymun adventure, the Roma of the Rostas family may face a future more bleak than the past they tried to leave behind, writes Daniel McLaughlinin Tileagd, Romania
Clutching a crumpled plane ticket in one hand and tickling a laughing child with the other, Terca Ciurar says it's good to be home.
"It was horrible in Ireland, so cold and rainy that I couldn't wait to come back," she said, as she recounted a Dublin-London-Budapest-Tileagd journey that included a British Airways club-class flight between England and Hungary, paid for by the Irish State.
"I was only there a few days, but it felt like years," she told relatives who gathered round under a blazing sun to hear her tale. "I didn't eat anything and came back covered in mud."
Ciurar was one of more than 100 gypsies whose makeshift camp beside the M50 motorway in Ballymun appalled everyone from rights groups to road safety campaigners. They had sought refuge in Ireland from what they claimed was a life of squalor and violent discrimination in north-west Romania.
They finally took up the offer of a free flight home this week, when it became clear that officials would resist their pleas for a chance to remain in Ireland, amid fears that their continued presence could attract thousands of other Roma seeking new lives, jobs and benefits.
Their Irish adventure horrified Romanian diplomats in Dublin and Bucharest, who fear that such lurid publicity will sully their country's image and delay the lifting of work restrictions placed on its citizens by the Republic and most other European nations when it joined the EU on January 1st this year.
BUT THE CLAIMS of some of the Tileagd Roma - that they lived beside a rubbish dump where they foraged food, and were beaten, harassed and barred from every decent job - also raised tough questions about Europe's 10 million gypsies, the continent's largest, poorest and fastest-growing minority.
"I didn't go [to Ireland] to beg," insists Ciurar. "I went with my husband to find work. We wanted money to build a house for our son, and were told there was work in Ireland. There wasn't. There's no work here either, but at least I'm at home and I eat once a day."
Such tales are being told across Tileagd's Roma settlement, where families a dozen strong live in ramshackle two-room houses, and work is scarce and state benefits meagre. Most houses have electricity but there is no running water, and parents and children often sleep together on the floor, beneath a bare lightbulb, surrounded by ornate rugs and carpets that are treasured possessions.
The Roma say that after January 1st, when EU membership allowed Romanians to travel visa-free across the bloc, relatives who left Tileagd for Ireland several years ago implored them to come to Dublin, where accommodation, jobs and social security supposedly awaited.
Seduced by far-fetched tales of easy wealth, many men funded their trip by selling the family horse, used for transport and farm work and for breeding offspring that are sold for vital cash. They paid a travel agent for a five-hour minibus ride to Budapest and a flight from there to Dublin.
Almost the only regular work for Tileagd's Roma comes from the Smiles Foundation, which runs the school it built for the village, helps the gypsies improve their homes and is drilling a well to source clean water. But even the foundation lost employees to the glittering mirage of life in Ireland.
"Augustin Rostas worked as security at our nursery for more than two years, making €180 a month, compared to the national minimum wage of about €120," says Kevin Hoy, chief executive of the Smiles Foundation, which has been working in Tileagd since 2001. "He was a well-respected member of his community, with about 12 children, a horse and a good house in the Romanian part of the village. In June he gave up his job here and sold his horse to go to Ireland, and took one of his sons, Malin - one of our best pupils - out of school to go with him.
"Now he's back here, he's embarrassed, he's lost his job, he's sold his horse, he's got no money and he's lost respect in the village."
This is the same Augustin Rostas who, gesturing to his makeshift shelter in Ballymun, told The Irish Times: "I no want to go back to Romania. I die from the hunger in Romania. Here I have somewhere where I can sleep."
The day after returning home, Augustin is lying low.
His brother, Gyuri, at first says Augustin is in the nearby city of Oradea; then that he is at home but very drunk; then that he is simply too embarrassed to speak to us.
Gyuri (41) is the leader of one half of the Roma community in Tileagd, which lives near and takes its name from the railway station, "Gara". They are wary of and look down upon the community that lives a few hundred yards away, near the river from which it takes its name, "Cris". Almost all the Tileagd Roma are in fact members of the vastly extended Rostas family, but the rivalry between the Gara and Cris factions is fierce, and violence has led to murder in the past.
Gyuri derides the Cris Roma as no-good layabouts, thieves and beggars, and blames them for encouraging his Gara Roma to leave home and head for Ireland.
"Our people met theirs at the council office getting their dole money, and were called by relatives in Ireland, and they fell for stories about this great life over there," he says. "The main problem is that sometimes we don't get our benefits for a month, and when we do get paid it's only two weeks' worth. People buy food on credit and quickly get into trouble because they can't pay it back. If we got our dole money properly, people might never have gone to Ireland."
In Romania and across eastern Europe and the Balkans, however, the widespread problem of poverty is compounded for the Roma by the effects of centuries spent living on the very margins of mainstream European society.
"The Roma are very tribal and like to live in their own, large communities," says Kevin Hoy. "But when their children go to school here, they often don't speak any Romanian, so they go straight to the bottom of the class and are left behind. They get no education or qualifications, so cannot get a job, and the cycle of crime, poverty, illiteracy, poor health and prejudice continues."
LOCAL OFFICIALS INSIST they ran campaigns to inform everyone in Tileagd and the surrounding area about EU travel and work regulations, and that employment fairs in the last year offered hundreds of jobs to gypsies, only a handful of which were taken up.
But Marian Daragiu, from Roma rights group Fundatia Ruhama, in Oradea, says illiteracy undermines most information programmes and job offers are less enticing than they seem.
"Jobs are usually a long way from Roma areas, so people have to leave their communities and go into an often hostile workplace, pay for travel, lunch and something to wear at work, try and get clean in often unsanitary conditions at home, all for a very low wage," says Daragiu. "That's why many Roma prefer to stay in their community, claim benefits and have time to be with their family and work on the grey or black market, in the fields or on building sites."
Anna Demian (68), who has 13 children and 140 grandchildren by the Rostas man who founded Tileagd's Roma settlement, says she always knew the Irish adventure would end badly, and is glad to see her relatives coming home.
Geta Rostas is less ebullient. Her striking features are lined and careworn, and she looks much older than her 32 years. The corrugated-iron roof of her tiny house flaps in the wind and her eight children laugh and play inside as she awaits the return of her husband, Constantin, who lost a leg when he was run over by a train at the age of nine.
"He can't work, so he went to Ireland to beg, because we all sleep in one room and want to build another. But his mum sold a house to help pay for his trip, and now we'll have to pay it all back," she says, her eyes hooded with worry as her children whirl around her. "He cried on the phone when he told me he was coming back. And he said that he didn't have a single penny in his pocket."