People fear crime so let’s look at crimes committed by immigrants. So far as I know, no-one in Ireland has been recording how often people of various nationalities are up in court. The best indicator we have is data on the use of interpreters. According to The Courts Service of Ireland, the use of interpreters went up thirty-fold in the years 1997 to 2009. Available data conflate civil and criminal cases and will include victims and witnesses as well as accused persons. Also, not all immigrants in court need interpreters. But the data do tell us what languages, and by broad inference what nationalities, most often figure in court. I have appended data for recent years to this article and I invite you to look at that now.
In first place is Polish with about 2,300 interpreter jobs a year. Followed by Romanian, Lithuanian and Russian. After these you will see another 70 or so languages for which interpreter services are provided.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who has spent any time at courts of law that the top four foreign languages in use are from the east of Europe. Go into your local district court on a day that a criminal list is being heard and have a look at that list displayed in the court foyer. Of a typical seventy or so cases on a day’s list, you will notice that non-Irish names, particularly Eastern European-looking names, are there to a greatly disproportionate degree. Go inside and you will see the sort of charges people are facing. These will include public-order charges, which almost always means incidents related to drunkenness, also fighting, drunk and disorderly, beating up the women in their lives etc. The men up in court are often homeless alcoholics, as you will probably guess from their appearance. Standing among these men you will see a scattering of smartly-dressed young women. These are the interpreters.
Stand outside the Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin, as I often do for my podcast work, and you will meet people waiting for their cases to be called. You will meet drinkers and you will meet people smoking “weed” (cannabis is de facto legalised in Ireland, the smokers will tell you).The smokers are generally a quiet lot but the drunks are noisy and sometimes obnoxious. The smokers are Irish. The drunks are mostly Polish.
Speak to the Poles there and they will tell you sad stories. They are rough sleepers. Many of them are covered in grazes and bruises. They live a tough life on the streets and, to their horror, they sometimes have their booze taken away from them by the Gardai. They get into fights and, from time to time, they end up in court and in prison. They would have come to Ireland as young men and worked hard and drank hard. Now, heading for middle age, they work less but drink as much as ever. If, as I describe them here, the Poles remind you of a different ethnic group that you will meet in Britain then that is intentional on my part and I will return to that later.
The Poles are popular among fellow-criminals. A few years back, while speaking to people coming out of Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, I met a man who was elated to have just been released. He had white froth around his mouth, looking like a fellow who had been interrupted while shaving, perhaps. So what was with the white froth? Oh that, he said, was off the farewell drink he had just had in a cell with his Polish pals. The Poles, he explained, make alcoholic drink using water and bread. It’s a skill they learned from their dads and grandads (honed through decades of having to endure communist austerity, I expect). The alcohol-making ingenuity of Polish prisoners puts them in high esteem with Irish prisoners.
Poles, in my experience, are generally well-liked by Irish people. So how can it be that this group, who are more often in court than any other language group, are popular when other nationalities, who appear to behave themselves much better, are more likely to meet suspicion and resistance if they are moving into an Irish town?
At this point, I have to confess that the figures I have accessed on court interpreter services have somewhat spoiled the point I was originally setting out to make when I planned this article; that was to be about the paradox that we like the Poles better than we do other nationalities who are much less often up in court. I was going to say that Arabic is far less heard in court than is Polish. For that had always been my experience; in years of court reporting, I have only ever rarely seen a Koran called for so that a person giving evidence may take an oath beginning “I swear by Almighty Allah…”. But as I look now at the figures, I see that the use of Arabic in our courts has been rising rapidly in recent years.
While still well behind Polish, the use of Arabic in our courts has gone from 199 in 2020, to 349 in 2021, 554 in 2022 with the figure looking likely to be about 600 by the end of 2023. That means the use of Arabic in our courts has gone up three-fold in the last four years. I don’t know why..
But the point remains that we still don’t seem to fear the boozy Poles like we fear the sober, largely law-abiding Muslims. It doesn’t seem fair. But our bias isn’t baseless.
Whenever I want to meet Muslims in Ireland I wander the length of Dublin’s South Circular Road (SCR). A lot of Muslims live in the rented accommodation of that area and they are obvious to see when out walking. I believe strongly in the use of the vox pop as a journalistic tool. You meet people unfiltered, allowing them to say things that “community leaders” would wish that they had not.
In the past, I have spoken to Muslim women on the SCR about the wearing of face coverings. A Pakistani woman, a doctor, once told me that when back in her home country she covers herself according to how “male-dominant” the region is that she is visiting. That report, after broadcast, earned me a notice posted at the SCR mosque saying that women should not be talking to that journalist who should instead be addressing problems like drug abuse and unemployment and, furthermore, what Muslim women choose to wear was none of his business anyway. I got a buzz out of that. A journalist always enjoys irritating those who would control the free speech of others.
The misogynistic attitudes within Muslim culture are well-known and there is no need to rehearse them here. It took the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and the reaction of Muslims in Ireland to that, to really scare me.
That was in January of 2015. I took to the SCR to report for RTE radio. I met Muslims who were appalled by the Paris murders. And I met Muslims who were, as observed on air by programme host Sean O’Rourke, “sneaking regarders”, which is an expression dating from the years of the Northern Ireland conflict to describe those people who would tell you “I don’t support violence, but…”.
But the most disturbing interview I took on the SCR that day was one that I couldn’t put on air for reasons which will become obvious as I tell you about it now. It was in a cafe on the SCR that a group of three Algerian men, delivery drivers all, invited me to join them for a coffee. The most vocal of them, a big, broad-shouldered, young man, was not a sneaking regarder. He wholeheartedly endorsed the murder of the 12 Paris cartoonists. “They were warned”, he said. It was like watching a furnace door opening as this man fanned himself into anger before me. Then he stuck his face into mine and shouted “How would you like to see a cartoon of Jesus Christ being fucked up the ass? Answer me!”. I said I would not like to see that. “You see!”, he said triumphantly, “and, my friend, for you I would defend Jesus too”.
His smile was warm and genuine. As we both agreed that the imagined drawing he described would be horribly offensive, he seemed to believe that I had therefore come around to sharing his view that the appropriate response to the maker of such an image would be to machine-gun that person to death. The difference in values, the cultural chasm between me and this Muslim man could not have been greater, even as he seemed to believe that we had now become close.
The Poles don’t frighten us. Their travails here in Ireland remind us, as I intimated earlier, of the bad ways Irish people can fall into when away in Britain and elsewhere. We know what to expect with drunks and how to cope with them. And our Gardai have seen it all before, since long before East Europeans ever started coming here.
But we don’t know what to expect from people whose values and culture are often hugely different from our own. And that’s why it’s okay to not regard all groups of immigrants in the same way.