One of the guests on RTÉ’s Upfront programme this week was Dr. Ciara Smyth of the Irish Human Rights Centre based at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She lectures in migration and asylum law, and previously worked for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.
No mention was made of the fact that she was previously vice chair of the board of the Irish Refugee Council (IRC).
Dr Ciara Smyth is part of the Irish refugee council.
RTE forgot to mention that. #IrelandBelongsToTheIrish
— Niall O’Hara 🇮🇪 (@ThoughtsToby) April 9, 2024
It was noticeable too, that while Smyth made reference on Upfront to the “concerns” of communities, she took a far different approach when interviewed on Drivetime on January 17.
She was certainly not sympathetic to said communities in that outing, and threw in the old saw about the “far right” with regard to local protests.
She was also asked on Drivetime about concerns regarding persons arriving here in large numbers from countries in which there are no wars or internationally recognized crises to justify this. She appeared to claim that Nigeria was practically ungovernable and also rejected the depiction of Georgia as a safe country – as now designated by the state – as there might be “individual victims of persecution and human rights abuses.”
Dr. Smyth’s previous role with the IRC and her association with the Irish Human Rights Centre at NUIG are relevant given that both have benefitted hugely from funding and connections that have focused on the liberalization and normalization of the Irish state’s migration and asylum systems.
Indeed, it would be little exaggeration to state that both institutions, and some of their main funders, have been instrumental in that liberalization and normalization process. This can be seen directly in the funding of both the IRC and the Human Rights Centre by Atlantic Philanthropies – the fund founded by US billionaire Chuck Feeney which has pumped hundreds of millions into organisations seeking change in Ireland.
Between 1997 and 2014 the Irish Refugee Council received more than $7 million from the Chuck Feeney Atlantic fund, a figure which includes a grant worth $3 million awarded to the IRC in 2014. That enabled it to expand its operations exponentially over that period and subsequently, particularly since 2014 when its workforce of 8 grew to 42 by 2022.
If there is a perceived need for such migrancy and racism bureaucracies, and the IRC is only one part of a large and expanding network, then they ought to be able to survive on their own two feet with voluntary public donations rather than being dependent on politically motivated foreign foundations and the state.
The latter point is central, as while the expansion of the IRC and other advocacy NGOs would have been impossible without the injection of the billionaire funds, the key factor – as it has been for similar advocacy NGOs kick started and still partly dependent on Woke Capital – is that since 2014 it has managed to draw down somewhere close to €2 million in public funds.
Atlantic Philanthropies has played the same role in the genesis and sustenance and role of the Irish Human Rights Centre. On its webpage, which is part of the National University of Ireland, Galway site, the Centre states that it is “one of the world’s premier academic human rights institutions, dedicated to the study of human rights, peace and conflict, international criminal law and humanitarian law, international refugee and migration law, gender and human rights and climate justice.”
What it neglects to inform us is that the Centre is entirely the creature of Atlantic Philanthropies. It would not exist were it not for the fact that in 1998 Atlantic made a grant of $1,004,278 to NUIG for the express purpose of “establishing a centre for human rights”.
While some will claim that Feeney and the money he gave to the IHRC and others was solely generated by a concern to help, the foreword to Liam Collin’s book which he wrote for Atlantic on its role here begins by describing how they saw Ireland, namely, “a conservative society where human rights for many were constrained, and services for the young and old were limited, at best.”
Atlantic Philanthropies has written that it used the law to “secure social change on the Island of Ireland”, and boasted that its grantee “focus on providing legal advice and representation to particular groups including the Irish Refugee Council, the Immigrant Council of Ireland.”
It boasts that Atlantic’s support “helped strengthen and expand the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (GLEN) and Marriage Equality (and its predecessor), two organizations that laid the groundwork for passage of a civil partnership law in 2010”. They note the referendum on Marriage Equality then followed.
In the same report, Atlantic explains that the fund’s leadership provided the money to pilot the Constitutional Conventions which then became the Citizens Assemblies – the vehicles for so much social change, though the last effort failed spectacularly on March 8th with a landslide double NO vote in referenda.
Feeney – the “great visionary” as Collins depicts him after the fashion of admirers of the Songs of Pyongyang – or perhaps more accurately, Feeney’s proteges here, knew exactly what they were at.
The concept of human rights in this context only holds up if one considers that the right of two persons of the same sex to get married is a human right, or that abortion is a human right, or that unrestricted immigration under the rubric of asylum is a human right. Which is where the Human Rights Centre comes into play – to provide intellectual and academic backing for such claims. Claims that are not as axiomatic as they and others might wish us to imagine them to be.
The Centre itself appears to be influenced by contentious intellectual trends on the left. For example Professor Anna Arstein-Kerslake developed the first module on Critical Social Theory, which includes Critical Race Theory, at NUIG. She is also the Athena SWAN lead on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion there.
Professor Siobhán Mulally used to be the Chair of the Irish Refugee Council and was also on the board of another migrant advocacy NGO, NASC. She has also been a Commissioner with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and is currently a member of the Department of Foreign Affairs committee on human rights.
Professor Roja Fazeli is currently the Chair of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, an NGO which received almost $9 million in funding from Atlantic Philanthropies. She is also involved with the Marie Sklodowska-Curie foundation EU funded NETHATE project whose purpose you can probably guess.
Ironically, perhaps, in its trumpeting of its role in changing Ireland, Atlantic claims that one of Feeney’s motivations was to address a situation in which “university graduates were leaving for other countries, creating a brain drain that could be potentially devastating to Ireland’s future.” How is that going then? There is no small connection between Atlantic’s success in funding the drivers of mass immigration and the fact that so many educated and employed young people leave the country.
Perhaps we need some academic institution or state-funded entity to investigate all of that? Rather than leave it to investigators such as ourselves at Gript and others. The Gaelic League and the GAA and the Irish trade union and cooperative societies and national press of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were free of such dependency and clearly that independence is preferable.
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