Sir, - Bloomsday, 1998: A bill to make employers pay big penalties for employing illegal immigrants is introduced to the Oireachtas. Irony piled upon irony!
At the time, I am in the offices of ARASI - the Association of Refugees and Asylum-seekers in Ireland, Number 4 Preston Street, for the official opening by Liz McManus TD. Not a bowler hat in sight. The front window is boarded up - the result of an attack two nights previously. Presumably, the gardai will advise ARASI that they shouldn't risk setting up an office, in the same way as they shouldn't risk walking out after nightfall. Only themselves to blame for being visible!
I think about Joyce. Would he have had grounds for applying for asylum under UN guidelines when he and Nora arrived in Pola, on the grounds that they both faced personal persecution for offending the moral and religious mores of the nation they had fled? Luckily for them, and for us, they weren't required to prove it in the Kafkaesque manner required of asylum-seekers in Ireland today. And Joyce might have reeled off half of Ulysses in the time it would take for his assessment interview to take place. And Berlitz better watch out! If they show such a cavalier attitude here to the teachers they employ as they did in Pola and Trieste, in taking on Joyce and his brother Stan, they're going to be fined £25,000 a shot for their folly.
Come to think of it, Joyce wasn't shy about bringing over members of his family! His sister Eva came too. But even he didn't come near the figure of seven, plucked from the air by Minister John O'Donoghue and rabbited ever since, mantra-like, by the Department of Justice spin-doctors.
Twice Joyce sought and was granted refuge in Switzerland - from both World Wars. Each time he concocted facts to suit his case, as one would expect of anyone with intelligence in a state of alarm. How would an Irish immigration official today react if presented with the Joyces' four passports (Joyce, Nora, son Giorgio and grandson Stephen) but only three visas as they fled Vichy France for Switzerland in 1940? My prognosis would be pessimistic. Luckily, the Joyces got the nod, even if Stephen's tricycle was seized.
Later, I hear that the house in Usher's Island where Joyce set The Dead is to be renovated as a cultural centre. Great! But ironic, considering it had offered asylum nearly 30 years previously to the Morkan sisters and their niece Mary Jane, when they arrived as economic refugees forced to leave their home across the water to the north in Stoneybatter!
Like the battered house in Usher's Island, the ARASI premises in Preston Street has broken windows. Clearly, Mister Deasy's xenophobic ghost ("Why has Ireland the honour of being the only country that never persecuted the Jews? Because we never let them in!") is alive and well in Dublin nearly 100 years later, and spends his nights harassing anyone from far away who dares to seek refuge as an exile. - Yours, etc., Donal O'Kelly,
Dublin 6.