When asylum seeker Kadima Mbuye appeared before Judge Marian O’Leary in Kilmallock Courthouse in 2019 on charges of indecent exposure, his defence lawyer told the court that Mr. Mbuye had been in Ireland at that stage for “four or five years”, putting his arrival from the Democratic Republic of the Congo somewhere around 2014 or 2015.
His conviction that day, for masturbating in front of female staff and residents in the Mount Trenchard asylum centre in which he was then resident, was his fifth for the same offence, and he had already been to prison for interfering with himself in the unwanted sight of others. There could have been no doubt about his guilt, since, despite his not guilty pleas, he’d been recorded in the act on CCTV.
Nevertheless, Judge O’Leary was in a forgiving mood. The Limerick Leader at the time quoted her thus: “This man obviously needs help. It is not going to improve by a custodial sentence. They all happened around the same period of time. He has already served six months.”
Far be it from me to argue with the learned Judge, but of course the point of prison is not necessarily to improve things for the criminal. Putting Mr. Mbuye in prison might have accomplished an alternative improvement: Keeping the public safe from his predilections.
As it happens, there is no record of Mr. Mbuye committing further acts of criminality over the following twelve months, but it was not long until he was before the courts again: In 2021, he found himself in front of Judge Treasa Kelly at Dublin District Court. This time, his offence was not public masturbation, but threatening people with a knife. The Gardai objected to bail.
The objection to bail was not agreed to by Judge Kelly: She released him, on his own bond of one hundred euros. Defence solicitor Tony Colliers, however, had good news for the court:
“He is in discussion with the Department of Justice in relation to voluntary repatriation. It was a complex and lengthy process, Mr Colliers said, arguing that his client was not a flight risk.”
Voluntary repatriation: In other words, the Irish state was engaged in discussions with Mr. Mbuye about whether he might like to go home of his own accord.
By this time, he had been convicted at least six times of public masturbation, and was facing charges of threatening people with a knife.
Yesterday, Mr. Mbuye was sent to prison again: This time for, you guessed it, indecent exposure, having been so determined to commit his crime that he managed to utilise a walking aid to go to a woman’s ward, get past her privacy screen, and then unzipping himself and carrying on with his activities at the foot of her bed. He will, we are told, be deported when he serves his sentence.
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We are told as a matter of course by senior journalists and senior politicians that it is vital that there should be “public trust” in Ireland’s immigration and asylum system. We are also told as a matter of course that it is deeply wrong and borderline racist to link immigration with crimes, and most especially to link immigration with sexual crimes. The idea that Irish women are at risk from migrants is something that would rank near the top of any respectable person’s definition of misinformation or disinformation.
And yet, here we have a case where the record shows that this man came here a decade ago, has never been granted asylum, and has racked up a considerable body count of victims. His latest victim, for example, told the courts that she now suffers with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that she has trouble sleeping.
We know what the Irish authorities knew about Mr. Mbuye, and we also know, more importantly, what they did not know.
They knew that he was a serial sex offender. He had the convictions to prove it.
They did not know that his serial sex offending would forever remain confined to indecent exposure. It is by the grace of god alone that there is no woman on this island, to our knowledge, who was not in the wrong place at the wrong time when Mr. Mbuye’s urges could no longer be confined to fiddling with himself in their presence.
We know too how the Irish authorities thought about this: Judge O’Leary’s comment is particularly damning: “This man needs help, it is not going to improve by a custodial sentence”. Her job, one might argue, is not to help men like Mr. Mbuye. Her job is to protect the rest of us from such men.
We know too how the immigration authorities dealt with it: After all, Mr. Mbuye remains here. Those 2021 “negotiations” about whether he might like to leave of his own free will did not, it appears, produce fruit.
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How can any person, reading the case of Mr. Mbuye, have confidence in either the Irish justice system or the Irish immigration system? The public record shows that he has been here for a decade and left a string of victims. The public record shows that the authorities did not believe that he had a right to stay here – evidenced by the fact that they have now finally committed to deporting him.
The cost, in real terms, to this case, is not being paid by the state, or by the myriad NGOs and commentators who bleat about how unfair it is to talk of such cases. The true cost is borne by Mr. Mbuye’s victims, women of both Irish and migrant heritage.
No doubt though, some of those NGOs and commentators will try to claim that this case is a one-off.
Is it? In truth, we do not know. But we do know – all of us – that an immigration and justice system worthy of the name would not produce outcomes like this. The idea that we should have “confidence” in that system is, I’d argue, the greatest form of “misinformation” of them all.
I chose to illustrate this article with a photograph of the Minister for Justice, because, in truth, Kadima Mbuye is not the person who should be held accountable for his record. She, by contrast, sits atop the system that has enabled him.