Sir, — John Moran’s article on Marta Fernandez Miranda de Batista’s request to the Irish government for political asylum on behalf of her husband, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, made for fascinating reading (Opinion Analysis, August 1st). It is, however, quite incorrect to refer to Batista as “Ireland’s first asylum seeker”.
The first significant group of people to seek refuge in Ireland were around 10,000 Huguenots, who left France in the late 17th century in the wake of widespread persecution and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. A further 50,000 settled in England, and these French Protestants are said to have coined the term “refugee” in the English language. These forced migrants gradually settled in the country, learned the language and intermarried with the Irish population.
Just two decades later, in 1709, the Irish House of Commons authorised the settlement of Protestant Palatines in Ireland.
The Palatines were fleeing the conflict with the French in their homeland in the Palatinate (Pfalz) in present-day Germany. Over 3,000 Palatines moved to Ireland in that year, the majority of whom settled on the estate of Lord Thomas Southwell in Rathkeale, Co Limerick. Over half of the Palatine refugees were dissatisfied with the refuge provided in Ireland and re-emigrated to North America.
After the second World War, the Irish government was reluctant to accept European refugees. The Department of Justice particularly opposed the resettlement of Jewish refugees in the State.
Nevertheless, in 1956, Ireland acceded to the Geneva convention relating to the status of refugees. This UN convention defined a refugee as “any person who, owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality [. . . ]”, although this applied only to European people who were refugees because of events that had taken place prior to 1951.
The same year that Ireland signed up to the convention, a group of 530 Hungarian refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion of Hungary were accepted into the country and accommodated in an army camp in Knockalisheen, Co Clare.
The Irish government made little provision for their resettlement, beyond providing accommodation, food and “pocket money”, according to UNHCR records, and considered their residence in Ireland to be temporary. Like the Palatines before them, the vast majority of the Hungarians in Ireland ultimately resettled in the US and Canada.
In fact, in 1959, Fulgencio Batista did not even qualify under the provisions of the Geneva convention, as it was not until Ireland acceded to the protocol relating to the status of refugees in 1968 that the right to seek asylum was extended to all nationalities, without geographical or chronological limitations.
The next significant group of people who sought refuge in Ireland were Spanish-speaking, like the Batistas, but from much further south than Cuba. They were Chileans fleeing the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet’s overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government.
It is timely indeed to look back on Ireland’s patchy history in relation to granting refuge and safety to those who seek it, when Eurostat figures for 2010 show that this State refused 98 per cent of applicants at first instance, the highest refusal rate in the EU. — Yours, etc,