BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
THE REPUBLIC of Ireland is known as the “land of a thousand welcomes”. It has welcomed 19,846 Filipinos who are now permanent residents or Irish citizens, data from the country’s Census 2022 showed.
Ireland’s population is small: 5.127 million. The nation has never completely recovered from the devastating famine of 1845, caused by the greed and inequality under British colonial rule that left millions of Irish in dire poverty and surviving on the potato, its staple crop.
The infection of potatoes by blight led to that famine and the country’s population starving. As many as a million Irish died of hunger and disease from 1845 to 1851. The British government ruled Ireland with an iron fist and without concern or compassion. It failed to provide sufficient food for thousands of starving people. The wealthy English landlords in Ireland continued to export grain and cattle to their country during the famine.
There was no choice for the Irish but to escape certain death and leave their country. More than a million of them did so as a quarter of the population perished. The Irish who rebelled against British rule were hunted down and executed. Others escaped and migrated to or sought asylum in the United States and Canada. They were welcomed there, as these growing nations needed them.
If we can remember this terrible human tragedy and colonial injustice, we will then understand why there are hundreds of thousands of hungry, poverty-stricken people, many of them victims of war and tyranny, fleeing to rich countries. They are escaping hardship and death by hunger or violence.
Five wars are being waged simultaneously in the world today — in Ukraine, the Palestinian Territories, Myanmar, Sudan and Haiti. War has devastated Syria and Afghanistan, and thousands of people have fled to Europe or the US.
There are almost two million refugees living in dire circumstances in tent cities in Turkey and Jordan. The starving and jobless poor from Africa are displaced and heading north, where there is a shortage of workers and an abundance of food, much of which is wasted.
Filipinos in Ireland were invited to come and work as nurses and caregivers, as homegrown ones were diminishing and the population ages. Of the 20,000 people with Filipino blood in Ireland, more than 6,000 are employed in the nursing sector. That figure represents 7 percent of the workforce and the biggest number of non-European workers in the country.
The once-generous welcome to migrants is diminishing as 22,000 asylum seekers and migrants have arrived in Ireland in recent years, almost doubling their number in the first six months of 2024. The Irish government is almost overwhelmed in providing shelter for these people as required by international law and European Union directives. (To be continued)/PN
