Migration Matters is currently doing some rethinking and restructuring. In the meantime, your comments and suggestions will be very welcome: write to migrationmatters[at]gmail.com. And please continue to send information on and links to stories we can publish on our return. Thanks.

Last week we featured Irish journalist Mark Little's new foray into online media, with a package on the Global Irish for RTÉ online as his first feature. I asked Mark some questions about what he's up to, and why.

Q. What precisely is the new venture?

A. Put simply, it will help you discover the most authentic voices on big international stories, by filtering the useful content from the useless noise on the real-time web and by developing a worldwide partnership of professional and citizen journalists. I'm keeping the name under wraps for the moment.

Q. Why did you leave RTÉ to pursue this? Could you not have done so within the national broadcaster?

It's hard for a big organisation like RTÉ to embrace new media. The very things which are valued on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook - feedback, devolution, sharing, equality - don't sit well within the editorial system of an existing media company. RTÉ is moving in the right direction but I felt I had a better chance to make a real difference outside the mothership.

Q. How did the RTÉ Global Irish feature come about?

A. I wanted to show that, for many people outside Ireland, being Irish is a source of inspiration. We are so caught up in our own problems right now, I thought it would be good to inject a little bit of hope back into our national discourse. But the project was also test for my new venture - could we get interesting, quality video from our network of content producers around the world and could we find a standard, attractive format for that content to be consumed?

Q. In what way was that different from conventionally sourced and produced broadcast media?

A. We removed the reporter. You heard first-person testimony; the most authentic way to tell stories. It will be a unique selling point of my new venture. The producers of video on the Irish feature were all journalists, but some had never shot video before. My plan is to initially recruit professionals in various locations but build our citizen base in the longer term.

Q. You're active - hyperactive perhaps - on Twitter. Is this the key new media tool, and if so, why?

Twitter is just a piece of technology. I don't have any great attachment to it. But I do love what it allows me to do: report and curate and connect with a broader community. I see it very much as an essential part of my journalism. But if a new and better piece of technology comes along, and it probably will, I will be happy to use it. This is the key message I have: don't get blinded by technology; concentrate on the human benefits it delivers.

Q. What next?

A. Work. Build. Grow. Change. Succeed.

Q. In Ireland, we're fascinated by our own diaspora, but have perhaps shown less interest in the media in those who have migrated into Ireland, with the result that their presence in the mainstream media has tended to be tokenistic. Does new media offer solutions to this predicament?

A. Social media is a tool, not a solution. An individual has to actually be inspired by a desire to change something through social media before social media has a value in this regard. So don't expect something to emerge organically from technology. People have to be motivated to take a risk first.

Put Out the Light is a new play set in Dublin about the tragic relationship between a Kenyan immigrant and an Irish woman. According to the writer, Paul Kennedy, the plays tells the story of Kenneth Tamund, who moves to Ireland from Nairobi, with things initially going well for him. But after he is detained and breathalysed by a corrupt garda on the way home from a late night party, his life begins to spiral out of control.

'The play is about the insidious and corrosive effects of racism, but also about the difficulty of untangling truth from false perceptions,' says Kennedy. 'Kenneth descends into a hell that could be partly of his own making and partly a response to intolerable pressure, in a culture that he once thought he understood. He does desperate things because desperate things are done to him.'

The plays stars the Ugandan actor George Seremba, whose one man show Come Good Rain has been acclaimed and toured internationally.

Put Out the Light runs at the New Theatre in Temple Bar, Dublin, from March 29 to April 3. There will be a post show discussion with the Kennedy and Seremba on Friday April 2. 

Paul Kennedy's previous plays include Stopping by the Woods, in the Dublin Fringe 2009 and Testimonies, a documentary piece about suicide co-authored with Mary Moynihan. 

The prominent liberal online magazine Open Democracy has launched a series of articles on migration, People on the Move. According to Open Democracy, the series features 'research-based articles and migrant testimony seeking to shift the focus of public debate on migration away from borders, security and control, to developing migration policies that are fairer and more equitable'.

From the most recent article, 'Women seeking asylum: shame and isolation', by Debora Singer:

Rani escaped Sri Lanka after her husband was murdered and she was raped by soldiers.  She told me that at her asylum interview in the UK  “I was happy with a lady interviewer but not a male translator. ... Because he was a man I felt ashamed. If it was a woman I would have said more.”  Contrast this with a woman who goes to report a rape to the police - she can ask for a female police officer to be present at her interview and will be supported by a specially trained officer throughout the police investigation and at any subsequent trial.

The past ten years have transformed the way the UK criminal justice system deals with domestic and sexual violence.  A number of criminal justice reforms have been introduced, designed to improve the investigation and prosecution of rape and domestic violence cases, to prevent police, prosecutors and judges from using dubious stereotypes relating to a woman’s credibility, and to provide increased levels of support to female victims of such crimes.  While not offering a panacea, there is little doubt that these reforms have brought some benefits.

However, there is a marked disparity between the experiences of female victims of sexual and domestic violence going through the criminal justice process in the UK, and that of women asylum seekers who have experienced the same crimes going through the asylum process.  Whilst the purposes of the two processes are not the same – one is to investigate a crime and the other is to determine refugee status – the sensitivities required are similar.  To rectify this disparity, the gender sensitive culture developed for women in the criminal justice system needs to be transferred into the asylum system. Continued here.

In 'Cry of a Migrant', Filipino domestic worker Marissa Begonia describes her experiences as a migrant worker:

I may able to give my children whatever they may need and ask for but the sacrifices in exchange of all these is far cruel, I was not there to take care of them when they were sick, I never see them grow.....migrant or second class citizen I may be, I am one of the migrants who cry for any injustices and abuse in job, labour law and fellow mankind.

The series is supported by the Barrow Cadbury Trust, which provides grants to grassroots voluntary and community groups working in deprived communities and supports policy makers working on issues of equality.

The entries in the On-Line Anti-Racism Creative Competition organised by the organisation Show Racism the Red Card have been published online here. (We covered the competition last November.)

The competition invited students around the country to watch a special 17-minute DVD and produce an art piece on the themes raised in the film.

The London Palestine Film Festival runs from April 30 to May 14 and features a selection of documentary, fiction, art, and animation by, about and from Palestinians and their country. Amongst the films are Elia Suleiman's latest film, The Time That Remains, with the director in attendance, the UK premiere of Eyal Sivan's groundbreaking documentary Jaffa: The Orange's Clockwork and Kamal Aljafari's Port of Memory. According to the programme:

Port of Memory follows the family of the filmmaker after they receive an order to evacuate their home in ‘Ajami, Jaffa's once prosperous seafront neighbourhood. Their lives and those of other residents are thrown into disarray as they lack the means to fight back. Radically poetic, Port of Memory is a reflection on the absurdity of being at once absent and present as a Palestinian living within Israel today.

There's also a photography exhibition, Intimate Portrayals, featuring Taysir Batniji's exploration of portrait photographs found in shops, cafes, factories and other places of daily work and life in Gaza, and Noel Jabbour' s Palestinian Interiors', which comprises a series shot in the Aqbat Jaber refugee camp, Hebron and Jerusalem focusing on decorated walls within Palestinian homes.

The festival's first week take place at the Barbican and it then relocates to SOAS. There's an article from the Guardian on the 2008 festival here:

If Palestinian cinema has the potential to speak for all the dispossessed of the world, overemphasising this runs the risk of ignoring all that is unique to it - in particular, a passion for films and film-making and a wry, everyday humour.

It's a shortwave radio station that runs no ads, doesn't have a website, and has a handful of staff and a paltry network of ten stringers earning about €70 a month. In these days when traditional media seems increasingly besieged by new media, with doubts about the very viability of traditional journalism in the new models, this is a story of one media outlet that is doggedly practicing very traditional values and doing so using traditional means.

Free North Korea Radio is run from Seoul and broadcasts voices of dissent into North Korea. David McNeill wrote about the station and its founder, Kim Seong-Min, in the Irish Times recently.

Run by defector Kim Seong-Min, the small shortwave station has an apparently simple mission: to bring democracy to one of the world’s most paranoid, secretive nations.

“But first we must have a free media there,” says Kim. “That’s what we’re working on.”

Carrying out that mission is dangerous, and sometimes deadly. Kim (48) is protected round the clock by two armed police bodyguards. In 2007 many of the station’s original team of stringers were caught and tried as spies, then sent to labour camps – or perhaps executed. “We don’t know what happened to them exactly,” he says, adding that the detections “devastated” him.

“The stress of knowing that could happen again is very hard to bear. Honestly, I often just want to quit.”
Building up a new network of stringers took time. Today, 10 freelance journalists provide reports from behind the bamboo curtain on a retainer of about $100 (€73) a month. They include a university professor, a teacher, at least two soldiers and a North Korean security agent.

FNKR provides them with small digital recorders, which are used to record interviews, and mobile phones with signals that work across the Chinese border – Pyongyang’s fledgling mobile- phone system was bought from Egypt and is incompatible with the South Korean network.

The recordings are smuggled across the Chinese border and transported back to Seoul via a network of spies.
The results detonate on air during Voices of the People , where the raw views of the North’s citizens – electronically distorted – are broadcast back into their own country. Brainwashed automatons in so much reporting, the people heard here emerge as thrillingly human, alive and angry.

FNKR has also been covered on CNN, in the New York Times, and on National Public Radio.

Kim Seong-Min won the 2009 Asia Democracy and Human Rights Award last December.

Wikipedia has more on the media in North Korea and on censorship in North Korea.

Since January last year, the Playhouse Theatre in Derry has been hosting a Theatre of Witness programme, which had its first production, We Carried Your Secrets, late last year.

The Theatre of Witness is described as ' new vision for performance where art and social justice meet' and bears the legend, 'Inspire, humanize, bear witness, transform, heal.' Developed by Teya Sepinuck, it is  performance method that aims to give voice to 'those who have been marginalised, forgotten or are invisible in society'. According to Theatre of Witness website:

Their true life stories, performed by the people themselves, are shared onstage so that audiences can collectively bear witness to issues of suffering, redemption and social justice. Theatre of Witness productions performed in spoken word, music, movement and film projection put a face and heart to societal issues of suffering, and celebrate the power of the human spirit to grow and transform.

Teya Sepinuck has been creating Theatre of Witness productions in the United States and Poland since 1986. Performers have included: refugees, immigrants, survivors and perpetrators of domestic abuse, teenage runaways, prisoners and their families, people living in poverty or without homes, families of murder victims, as well as women in transition, teen parents and people in recovery.

Some recent Theatre of Witness programmes have brought survivors of violence together with perpetrators and witnesses to explore issues of accountability, healing, guilt, restorative justice, forgiveness and redemption. The finished productions performed by the people themselves in prisons, theatres, schools, community centres and at conferences, create safe public forums for audiences to move beyond entrenched positions and ideologies towards understanding and healing.

There are video clips of various Theatre of Witness performances here, and more on past shows here. In Each Other's Eyes in 2002 looked at migration and diversity in the US.

We Carried Your Secrets brought together a group of fathers who were ex combatants during the 'Troubles' to tell their stories of the conflict and subsequent transformation, along with stories of the next generation, growing up in the shadow of the Troubles. It premiered in Derry and subsequently toured across Northern Ireland.

One of the participants is Robin, a former RUC officer and current Community Officer. He says:

My memories of cleaning up after so much carnage from the Omagh bomb earned me the right to speak. 
I've lived through the horror of seeing what human beings can do to each other and I now believe that we all have our part to play to turn this around for our children.

The follow up production is I Once Knew a Girl…, which will premiere this coming October, 2010, and will deal with the experiences of women in Northern Ireland. A documentary is being made on the process.

There is a podcast interview with Teya Sepinuck here and interviews with some of the participants here. The project was previewed in the Irish Times, here. Reviewing We Carried Your Secrets for Irish Theatre Magazine, David Grant wrote:

What sets it apart is the direct agency of its protagonists. Many theatre-makers in the past have sought to access the authentic experience of those involved, but this has usually been mediated by others – writers, directors and actors. The ‘performers’ in a Theatre of Witness production are the very people whose stories are being told.

Too often have well-meaning outsiders sought to engage the arts in the cause of peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland only to seem voyeuristic, disingenuous or exploitative. But any lingering cynicism must surely have been dispelled by the post-show discussion in which witness after witness spoke with candour and conviction about the positive impact the production had had on them.

One witness had seemed quite distressed throughout the performance and this gave rise to questions from the audience expressing legitimate concern about the ethics of his involvement. His response, that his brother with whom he had never discussed his feelings about the assassination of their father was in the audience for the first time, explained his demeanour. Although this in no way lessened the mutual discomfort of his exposure, it confronted us with the plain truth that understanding requires disclosure.

Flying in the face of the conventional concern for distance and objectivity, We Carried Your Secrets was in the purest sense a shared experience. In its refusal to recognise a hierarchy of suffering, it allowed everyone in the audience who lived through the ‘Troubles’ to acknowledge the lingering impact on our lives.

(More on David Grant here.)

RTE journalist Mark Little left the national broadcaster late last year to pursue an online news media venture. One of its first products 'screened' this week: a web feature of short 'Portraits of the Global Irish' for RTE's website.

These featured mini documentaries of individual emigrants, such as Mick Connery in Buenos Aires, who teachers hurling, a game which thrived amongst Irish emigrants in Argentina till the 1930s, to local children. (The concept and form was not unlike FOMACS's own series of ultra-short documentary portraits, The Richness of Change, produced with the Immigrant Council of Ireland.)

The Global Irish series can be viewed until April 5 on the RTE Player here.

Little was profiled in the Sunday Tribune here. Una Mulally, wrote:

As always, Little is ahead of the pack on this one. While Irish journalism is something of a backwater in terms of online media, both in content and understanding, if anyone is going to bring it out of the shadows, it's Mark Little.

According to his statement on leaving RTE:

The rise of social media platforms like You Tube, Twitter and Facebook provides an opportunity for journalists to change the way we report the world. I would like to take a more direct role in that transformation,' he said.

He can be seen elaborating on his vision for the media in a talk, 'The News is Dead, Long Live the News', in this videoed presentation at the Institute of International and European Affairs (which I highly recommend):

My theory is that there's a new consciousness in the way that we consume news that change the game completely...Suddenly now the means of production in journalism are in the hands of real people.

There's a terrific story in the first few minutes about the key moment that led him to move towards embracing new media: a trip to Afghanistan when he wasn't able to get a key story to air because of lack of space on Prime Time.

Little is a particularly prolific, and erudite, tweeter.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen spoke this week about power, justice, and ‘capabilities’ in the Demos Annual Lecture 2010. The video is on OpenDemocracy here (Sen gets going at about 8.30 in).

Sen has been increasingly influential in British politics, and was profiled last year by the New Statesman here, which included a key quote from Sen's recent work:

Responsible adults must be in charge of their own well-being; it is for them to decide how to use their capabilities. But the capabilities that a person does actually have (and not merely theoretically enjoys) depend on the nature of social arrangements, which can be crucial for individual freedoms. And there the state and the society cannot escape responsibility.

Sen's latest book is The Idea of Justice.

Separately, Sen has previously addressed issues of migration and development in this online interview with Radio Open Source, here. Open Source introduces this as follows:

Isn’t the immigration crisis the flip side of a development riddle? What would it take to make the lives of Mexican farmers sustainable in Mexico? How does it come to be that there are more African-trained nurses and doctors working in Europe than in Africa? Under the heading of “flood control,” what might the US be doing to address the tide of refugees from Latin America before they reach the Bush border fence?

Amartya Sen, the Lamont University Professor at Harvard, is of course an immigrant from India — in an America that he notes has always been hospitable to intellectuals and highly qualified specialists like him. Development economics is only one of his fields, and his technical studies are the least of his worldwide eminence. He is best known perhaps for the observed rule that famines simply do not happen in independent democracies with a free press; famines are invariably political and military “events,” as he first suspected on the basis of his own childhood witness of the famine in Bengal in 1943 which took 3 million lives. He is a feminist exponent of the argument that the single most important stroke in development policy (and population control) is the education of women. His new book Identity and Violence takes apart all the easy labels of ethnic and national destiny and smashes the monoliths of East and West: “Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.

The entry on Sen in Wikipedia is here.

Epidavros in Greece is home to a 4th century BC amphitheatre, and it was there, sitting on the steps of the amphitheatre, in the early 1990s, that filmmakers Shari Robertson & Michael Camerini decided to form a non-profit documentary film company that would interrogate and document the processes of governance and civic participation.

As the Epidavros Project, their signature film project has been the documentary Well-Founded Fear, which took an unprecedented inside look at the asylum system in the US, with the pair gaining the trust, uniquely, of both officials and applicants. Well-Founded Fear debuted at the Sundance Festival in a two-hour cut and went on to screen on various US networks. It is available from Epidavros here, along with various educations modules aimed at both students and legal professionals. (It's also available on Amazon.)

The Sundance Festival wrote of it:

'In a film marked by exquisite production values and striking intelligence, the filmmakers have dedicated themselves to an evenhanded empathy and critique of officials and refugees alike. What they argue is that any process where life becomes a story, a man becomes a God, and justice becomes a lottery is an imperfect one.'

There are reviews here, here and here.

An earlier film by Shari Robertson from 1987 also dealt with refugee issues: Waiting for Cambodia looked at the human cost of the geopolitical impasse that left Cambodian refugees stranded in refugee camps on the Thai border from 1975 till, ultimately, the early 1990s.

Camerini, meanwhile, says his 'interest in what it means to be a foreigner' is the 'unifying theme' in his work.

Their 1995 film, These Girls Are Missing, has been translated into seven African languages, telling stories of women and girls in education in different African countries.

Robertson & Camerini elaborate their filmmaking agenda here:

If you make documentaries on "issues" you know it is surprisingly easy to end up with a work that covers no new ground, or is self serving, or only states the obvious or worst of all, is merely self-congratulatory. And yet, films are a uniquely powerful means of communication. Particularly with subjects where viewers already hold strong opinions or attitudes (even if these are not necessarily well thought-out), movies can still rattle or jolt out a new perspective. Film draws us in with its immediacy and its intimacy. It puts faces to complex dilemmas and vibrates to the larger questions, the abstracts beneath and around the life on screen. It opens a door to a new way of seeing and understanding situations and ideas grown too familiar, creating a context to provoke and inform further. So, a film is also about what happens when the lights come back up. Its meaning lies in the conversation begun, not just the narrative finished. A beautiful and well-made documentary film finds ways to encourage -- even insist on -- deeper engagement from those who see it, and to demand reflection and debate.

For their latest project, see the post below.

The filmmakers behind the Epidavros Project (as above), Shari Roberton & Michael Camerini, have spent the last nine years immersed in an extraordinary, mammoth documentary task which has resulted in the 12-part series, How Democracy Works Now. The series is a behind-the-scenes look at the processes of lobbying and lawmaking on Washington DC's Capitol Hill, focussed on the political machinations around the issue of immigration reform. The project started in 2001. As they explain,

The thing that got us hooked on this story back in 2001 wasn't a passionate political position, but a report from a Washington think tank, a groundbreaking study by noted migration expert and founder of the new Migration Policy Institute, Demetri Papademetriou. Demetri and his team reframed the immigration debate in economic terms and outlined a plan to fix every aspect of American immigration policy in a way that would also offer millions of people living here illegally a way to become citizens.

They continue:

One of the biggest challenges we faced was getting access to film in exactly those places where this [lawmaking process] would have to happen -- offices in the Senate and the House. But Hill staffers do not seek the limelight, to say the least -- and they are rarely encouraged to do so. Congressional offices have very good reasons to be notoriously camera-shy. So we had to find a way to talk about what we had in mind that made it seem like a good idea, good enough to be worth the almost insane risk to them and their bosses. Something that would soften the horror.

Our films always end up being a collaboration with the people we're filming, so we like to be very clear about what we intend to do. When it came down to describing the idea we had in mind this time, the simplest and truest phrase was this: "how democracy works now". That seemed to sum it up -- we wanted to look into that black box between elections and legislation, and understand what sorts of collaborations and pathways were actually there. We kept kicking this idea around between ourselves, trying to think of a way to say it that sounded like a film title. And in the end, we just couldn't wait to come up with the right title, so we started explaining ourselves in the plainest terms possible, using the actual idea as the provisional title: How Democracy Works Now.

How Democracy Works Now sounds laughably earnest, it's true. It's a title only an educational film could survive, and probably not one that many people would ever see. And that worked out to be terribly useful. It became a stealth title that made us, and our camera, less threatening in places where cameras never go. And it tapped into a secret vein of altruism in a lot of the people we hoped to be filming as well. Hill staff jobs, and even the elected posts of those staffers' bosses, attract a surprisingly idealistic bunch of people. Participating in the working of democracy turned out to be exactly why a lot of them were there.

The website also features a lengthy, and fascinating, directors' statement, outlining the process of making the series:

We'd only been shooting for a couple of weeks though, and were barely getting started in the Senate when the attacks on September 11th, 2001 changed the course of US immigration history forever. Like almost everything else, immigration became just one more issue put aside as the country, and certainly Washington, DC, focused everything on the new reality of national security. There was nothing for us to shoot in Washington the next week. And nobody we'd been filming with really wanted to see us.

Many times over the years, we've wondered whether we shouldn't have stopped right then. Lots of film projects just don't work out. The key to survival as an independent is to recognize those and cut your losses in time. We'd done that in the past. This film idea barely started seemed like the least of the big problems - or even the big stories - right then, but somehow, we really didn't want to let it go. The idea of understanding what was inside that black box that fits between elections, how democracy worked in the America of the 21st century, had already gotten too deep a hold on us.

We stayed away from Washington for a while, and remembered a story we simply hadn't managed to shoot that had happened in Iowa over the previous summer. A local group of anti-immigration supporters had managed to hijack the High School Band's summer parade, and in the process, attract the attention of the national news which was zeroing in on anything and everything "immigration" at that point. We went out to see what was left.

There were wonderful possibilities for all sorts of documentaries right then in Iowa, of course. But with the 'how democracy works now' perspective, following the local City Council race in Mason City became our first object lesson in the big construct that ended up being the M.O. of the series and every film in it. The complicated ways that quite personal stories, particular immediate contexts and histories, accidents and coincidence play into an abstractly articulated framework of broad social policy goals and specific political aims to become the material of democracy -- that's what we ended up filming, and eventually editing to make these films.

We went back to Washington after the November elections in Iowa, and began our series of introductions and persuasion-assaults again. It wasn't exactly easy going, but it was fascinating. Gradually things began to melt a bit, and by winter 2002, we were on the way.

To see some brief clips from the resulting series, go here.

The website is a companion to the film project, with resources including an extensive series of character biographies (such as this one of FOMACS collaborator Frank Sharry), and an innovative text & video glossary, explaining key political concepts and jargon, and potentially of value to politics students in its own right. 

You can follow the How Democracy Works Now project via their busy feed on Twitter or on Facebook. US readers can view a film from the series, The Senators' Bargain, on March 24 at 8 pm on HBO2. This film features the late Senator Ted Kennedy and his battle for immigration reform as its centerpiece. The filmmakers are encouraging those interested to discuss the film on Twitter, using the #hdwn hashtag, and via liveblogging, with participants in the film, on the website.

Slightly off-topic, readers in Dublin may be interested in a series of academic events coming up in late March.
Michael Shanks, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Stanford University, will give a lecture on March 24 at the Humanities Institute of Ireland (HII) at UCD on areas of convergence between digital culture and the humanities, titled 'Digital Humanities: an archaeological prospect from Silicon Valley'. On March 25, he will take part in a day-long seminar on 'Digital culture and the future of the Humanities'. Email hii@ucd.ie for further details.

Shanks has an elegant and busy blog here.

According to the release from the HII:

Computation, information technology, digital media, and social software meet the Humanities. Institutional investment in the Digital Humanities is accelerating. Is this to be a new discipline? What of traditional forms of Humanistic scholarship? What are the implications of digital culture for the Academy? Professor Shanks will acknowledge new trends and ground a critique of digitally-enabled Humanities in a fresh perspective on humanistic scholarship since the eighteenth century, broadening the context from the Academy to cover new developments in digital culture, including social software, located and ubiquitous media, virtual worlds and Web 3.0. As an archaeologist, his focus is through memory practices and archives, long term historical trends, and cultural heritage, on issues such as cultural property, globalization and social justice, identity and documentation, and materiality/immateriality.

Prof Shanks will argue that the key issues facing the contemporary Humanities are to do with the basic practices of that cultural sector typically called the public sphere. The forms of text, image, publication, dissemination, critique, commentary, and debate are achieving a fungibility that prompts a radical evaluation of how the Humanities address matters of common and pressing concern, requiring even an examination of the qualities of humane living.

Michael Shanks is a Director of Stanford Humanities Lab and is a founder of Stanford Strategy Studio. His lab in Stanford Archaeology Center is called Metamedia, and 'pioneers the use of Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate collaborative multidisciplinary research networks in design history, media materialities and long-term historical trends'.

According to Shanks:

Archaeologists do not discover the past; they work on what remains. Archaeology, the discipline of things, design and making, is about our relationships with what is left of the past. This means we are all archaeologists now; cultural heritage lies at the core of who we think we are, and how we might respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Following the Twitter feed of the How Democracy Works Now project (above) led me to Witness, an international human rights organisation that provides training and support to local groups to use video in their human rights advocacy campaigns.

As they explain, beyond providing video cameras and editing equipment, Witness helps broker relationships with international media outlets, government officials, policymakers, activists, and the general public so that once a video is made, it can be used as a tool to advocate for change. There is more detail on their mission, and an introductory video, here. 

The Witness store has a range of documentaries available to buy, including a series of reports on refugees and displaced people.

There are a series of Witness videos available to view on The Hub, the 'world's first participatory media site for human rights'. (More on The Hub in a later post.)

You can follow Witness on Twitter here.

The photo above is from a 2001 film, Expelled, on the Dominican government's practice of illegal expulsion of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian decent.

Forum Polonia, the biggest network of Polish activist groups and organisations in Ireland, will mark its second birthday with a special convention tomorrow, Saturday March 6, in Dublin.

As well as reflecting on recent projects, the convention aims to report on the current situation of the Polish communities in the recession. Amongst the events are a group discussion on the needs of and challenges facing Polish migration and activist groups in Ireland, a seminar on networking in the NGO sector and a talk on being a social entrepreneur in Ireland.

Forum Polonia is a cooperative platform that brings together representatives of various Polish community organisations, the media, and individuals involved in projects relating to the Polish minority and its links to Irish society as a whole. The Forum maintains an active website, with an English version here (partially translated). Amongst the recent articles is one on the Walk & Talk initiative of Dublin City Council, which the council hopes to promote amongst immigrant communities as an integration initiative.

Forum Polonia can also be followed on Facebook.

'After you bought me’ is a new exhibition of photographs and text by young tribal women from Orissa, India, exploring the causes and effects of human trafficking. It runs from March 8 to 31 at the Irish Aid Volunteering and Information Centre on Upper O’Connell Street, Dublin.

The photos were taken by the women during a participatory photographic project in Orissa, east India in December 2008 and January 2009. According to the organisers, Zoё O'Reilly and Aidan Corcoran, rural Orissa, along with other areas in the so-called ‘tribal belt’, is an area with a high incidence of human trafficking. The images and stories explore the women's own perspectives and experiences relating to this issue. They are the result of a collaboration between the Irish-based Súil Eile project and Indian organisation Pragati. The material produced was initially used to create awareness of trafficking in the local villages as well as to help counter the stigma experienced by victims of trafficking on returning to their own communities.

Zoe O'Reilly is studying for a PHD in NUI Maynooth focusing on the use of participatory photography in researching migration and asylum in Ireland. The project in India, Súil Eile, was supported by the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund.

FOMACS and the British Council are collaborating on a new public education project, titled Learning Lab: ‘Identities and Social Justice’. The aim is to bring together individuals from different sectors with a commitment to social justice to discuss and develop ideas on debates about cultural identity and principles of social equality – connecting questions about race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, culture, language and religion, in addition to youth and age. The labs are being run in association with the Instituto Cervantes. Each lab runs for three days, with labs scheduled for April, May and September, 2010. Labs will be limited to 25 participants. Applications can be made here.

The Learning Lab sessions will be lead by three international public intellectuals:

Andrea Durbach, Director of Australian Human Rights Centre at the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia;

Handel Kashope Wright, Director of the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education, University of British Columbia, Canada and Board Member of the Highlander Research and Education Center, Tennessee, USA;

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, UK based broadcast journalist, writer and public speaker on race and cultural identities.

See the multimedia archive at the Learning Labs Library for more.

Agusto Boal, the pioneering Brazilian theatre maker, died last May. We didn't cover it on Migration Matters at the time, but I thought it would be appropriate to draw together some commentary and resources here.

Boal invented a form of participatory, activist theatre known as Theatre of the Oppressed, inspired by the Pedagogy of the Oppressed of Paulo Freire (also Brazilian). In it, theatre performances are improvised for community audiences in order to dramatise problems being faced by (or within) the community; at key points in the play, the audience is invited to step on stage and become the protagonists, in order to act out what should happen to resolve the problem. It was a revolutionary idea, and Boal took it all around the world, helping to spread the use of theatre as a tool of rights awareness and social justice.

An obituary in the Guardian elaborated on how this method developed:

'Boal was influenced by the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s - he took agitprop shows into the countryside and pioneered a radical kind of "living newspaper" in which the audience helped decide the subject of the play.

'At one point, when Boal's agitprop group was preaching the necessity of taking up arms, a peasant in the audience stood up and suggested an armed raid on a local landlord. Embarrassed, the actors backed down. But the incident taught them to listen to the people.

'Abandoning crude agitprop, Boal developed the idea of the "Theatre of the Oppressed". At first, this involved asking audience members for ideas for alternative endings to plays about oppression. Then, after an angry woman was so dissatisfied with how his actors interpreted her suggestions that she came on stage and showed them what she meant, he developed shows with more audience participation.'

Later, Boal was elected as a member of Rio de Janeiro's city council, and used his theatre techniques to encourage participation in lawmaking, calling it legislative theatre.

Boal was a regular visitor to Ireland: there is a podcast of Boal speaking at the Abbey in 2008 on Indymedia.

Other links:

An interview with Boal by Tom Magill, Belfast-based community theatre activist, from 1998.

Amongst the prominent practitioners of Boal's techniques on these isles are the London-based theatre company, Cardboard Citizens.

Theatre of the Oppressed on Facebook.

The Irish memorial page on Facebook.

The International Theatre of the Oppressed Organisation.

Memoir of a Soldier is a performance/exhibition at the Belfast Exposed Gallery by Israeli soldier-turned-choreographer Daniel Vais.

Subtitled 'How my country manipulated and used me to fight my neighbours and how I learned to transform hate into pure love’, it documents Vais's experience in the Israeli army - in which he spent three years and saw active service in various missions - and how he 'mastered the art of being invisible and learned to transform hate into pure and unconditional love'. Vais subsequently spent time in an Israeli jail 'and had to learn the art of forgiveness in order to keep sane,' he explains.

Daniel Vais was previously based in Ireland, where he worked with the Limerick dance troupe, Daghda which introduced the innovative Mamuska Nights - a kind of artistic open-house that has since spread internationally.

In Limerick, Vais set up the dance troupe Lovespotters, featuring performers with Down Syndrome, and conducted a number of successful tours with the troupe.

He followed this with a festival of 'outsiders' art and dance, before relocating to London. I interviewed him in 2008 during a rather delightfully quirky solo dance tour on Cape Clear, an island off the south west of Ireland. From that article:

Anybody can be a dancer, he believes. Everywhere he goes, he seeks to lead people out of the physical and emotional cul-de-sacs into which their inhibitions and life experiences lead them. He leads them literally – he draws people out of the watching audience and encourages them to dance with him. It doesn’t necessarily make for good performance (in a conventional sense) – but it makes for intriguing social dynamics. And, Vais believes, it can make for positive social development. He calls it “social choreography”. “I set the conditions for things to happen,” he says. He blurs the boundaries between high art, outreach and avant-garde experimentation.

Vais's Belfast talk, with accompanying 'dance ritual', takes place at 1-3pm on Wednesday, March 24, as part of the gallery's two month exhibition, Exchange Mechanism, curated by Raimi Gbadamosi. (Download the programme here. More on Daniel Vais here.)

During this time, the gallery 'will operate as an alternative political space, where visitors encounter set works, complicated by ‘disruptions’,' they say. 'The intention is to present visitors with the opportunity to engage with ideas; explain, interpret and respond to the work in as many ways as possible, in the context of political debate and multiple channels of exchange:  artist, viewer, art; public, politics, ideas; visitor, city, gallery. Simultaneously functioning as a debating chamber, an installation of esoteric and popular media and an archive display, Exchange Mechanism seeks to challenge the abstraction of spontaneous public, political and artistic encounters from everyday life.'

The concept is inspired by the 'increasing regulation of public space, restrictions on mobility, and routine invasions of personal privacy', leading to 'an interrogation of the demands and denials of freedom alongside artists’ responsibility to actively engage with the political'.

'We want people to get involved as speakers, organisers, activists and volunteers,' they say. The exhibition runs till April 9.

Belfast Exposed was founded in 1983 as a community photography initiative, and now functions as a gallery for contemporary photography with an emphasis on commissioning and publication of new work. It holds a community photography archive (with a portion of this available online) and runs an extensive educational outreach network.

See, for example, the photos in the Parades series of the archive.

Owen McCafferty's new play for Belfast's Lyric Theatre, The Absence of Women, is set in a bleak London hostel, but is a play about Belfast, writes Pádraic Whyte for Irish Theatre Magazine.

It is 'about the people who were forced to leave its geographic location but bound to carry with them memories of their home place,' he says. 'McCafferty’s thought-provoking new play brings us on a series of journeys with the protagonists, Ger (Karl Johnson) and Iggy (Ian McElhinney), from their public pasts and the contribution they made to the building of British transport systems, to their private memories of their youth and the burdens which they are now left with.

'Themes of masculinity, silence and invisibility are to the fore of the play. Ger tells Dotty that “Belfast men don’t dance”, a line his father used, and offers her a drink instead, while Iggy is forced to leave Belfast because he does not conform to the apparent norms of society. Both men may have lived the majority of their lives away from Belfast, yet they have carried with them the experiences and memories of their formative years, and the change of geographical locale has done little to change their lives.

'In recent years, the lives of Irish navvy workers in England have received much attention on stage and screen, and there is a feeling that we have heard many of Ger and Iggy’s stories before. However, McCafferty’s play does add a specifically Belfast dimension to these representations. As Ger longs to return to Belfast for one last drink, he wonders if the city has changed. The Belfast that Iggy and Ger left had particular notions about masculinity, the consumption of alcohol, the treatment of women, and cultures of silence – how does that world compare to a contemporary Belfast? Perhaps, in this linking of past and present, McCafferty raises the most pertinent question of the piece.'

The full review is here. Details of the play, which ends on Saturday February 27, are here. More on McCafferty here.

The Day the Immigrants Left was a novel and provocative 'life swap'-style documentary that screened on BBC1 on Wednesday in which native British people who were unemployed were invited to take jobs typically held by immigrants. (I didn't see it, alas.)

The presenter, Evan Davis (pictured), wrote about it in the Times, here. The documentary was reviewed in the Guardian here and the Independent here.

It was watched by 5.3 million viewers and a 21% share in the 9pm hour, reported the Guardian.

Evan Davis told the BBC:

'The programme started really with a hypothetical alternative world in which you ask 'what would society be like if we didn't have the immigrants here?'

'The conceit of it is to take immigrants out of Wisbech and to see how life continues there. We hear a lot of people saying that the immigrants have stolen our jobs, that there aren't any opportunities for Wisbech people.

'There are mixed results in the experiments we've done," he said.

'Some, you could see that the British workers were up to the job and could do it. And quite a few where you could say that the British workers didn't put their backs into it, didn't want to put their backs into it, or couldn't put their backs into it.

'What's undoubtedly the case is that a lot of these jobs are back-breaking jobs, and there is not a lot of demand by British workers to do these.'

Readers in the UK can watch the doc on the BBC's iPlayer here.

The film was made by Leopard Films.

Latin America Week takes place from April 19 to 24, and amongst the events will be a photographic exhibition on 'The role of Older People in Food Sovereignty in Latin America and Ireland'.

The exhibition is being curated by the Latin American Solidarity Centre (LASC) and Age Action Ireland, and will be displayed at the Irish Aid Volunteer and Information Centre, Dublin during April.

The curators have issued a call for photos for the exhibition, inviting those interested to send photos to  lascphotoexhibition10@gmail.com by March 15 (postal entries to Mara Sánchez, LASC, 5 Merrion Row, Dublin 2).

Entries are required to follow the principles of Dóchas Code of Conduct of Images (download pdf here). Dóchas is the umbrella organisation for Irish non-governmental development & aid organisations. See also the Dóchas report of a conference on how African and developing countries are portrayed in the media, here.

For more on 'food sovereignty', see here and also the LASC powerpoint on the issue, here. Upcoming events at the Irish Aid centre are here.

There's been an interesting discussion recently on the listserve run by the Global Investigative Journalism Network on online media in Africa and developing countries. To subscribe to the list, send an email with "subscribe GLOBAL-L your name" in the body of the mail to listserv@lists.reporter.org. I have edited some excerpts below.

Rosebell Kagumire writes:

Though there are still hurdles, this doesn't mean African newspaper businesses should be seated idle waiting for a miracle of internet access for all for them to think of venturing into online media. Most media in Africa make efforts to include the youth in the normal newspapers, even if this group is not likely to buy a newspaper. However, they are the group that are educated, and who bother to access the internet. Newspapers are still stuck in age-old strategies and have yet to wake up.

I am in Costa Rica and get most breaking news from friends. It is frustrating that I have to wait for about 12 hours for a newspaper in Kampala to upload a story on their website. Some newspapers have started blogs for almost hourly updates and improved their online opinion pages to try to get the public interested. Others only have websites that carry months old news.
Much as there are still challenges for online news businesses, the owners aren't using even the limited access most countries have. I don't expect the African online media to necessarily take on the shape of the European or American way but we can use other advantages that are there in our communities.

I haven't seen any news outlet that has tried to use the wide spread of mobile phones and online news. Radios in my country have gained a lot from this because you can find more than 10 mobile phones in each village and this means information will be available faster. The African media market simply hasn't woken up to take advantage of the internet age in the best way.

Eugene N Nforngwa, editor of the Standard Tribune newspaper, Yaounde, Cameroon, writes:

One thing we cannot lose sight of is that online journalism is the future of African newspapers. The current skepticism is similar to that which followed the arrival of the mobile phone. We all know that this story is different today, wherever you are on the continent. With respect to many areas of innovation, Africa can be expected to experience huge technological bypasses. Take television for example. Most channels in my country are ignoring relay transmitters and hooking up on satellite and are able to broadcast to the entire world from day one.

One of the biggest challenges facing most of Africa's print media is infrastructure and cost. In Cameroon, there are only two printing presses serving hundreds of newspapers. Magazine publishers have to take their work to places like UAE and India to have good quality work. On top of all of that, sales are generally low and are set to keep falling, thanks partly to poor means of circulation.

Online publications offer both huge cuts in cost and wider reach. There is a huge market for African news in the Diaspora. This is the best way to attract younger readerships. It also offers a great way of bypassing the muzzling that is still very rampant in some of our counties. What is lacking presently is real investment in online journalism.

Eugene Nforngwa blogs here and tweets here.

Tobi Soniyi writes:

The fact that online journalism succeeded in Europe and America does not mean it would succeed in Africa, not to mention individual African countries. That is where the problem is. Literacy level differs from one country to another. In Nigeria, a lot of people buy papers because they identify with the region where they are published. A Hausa Fulani who cannot read and write will still buy a Daily Trust newspaper.

In Africa you pay heavily to get access to the internet and you also want them to pay to access a newspaper website? You are wasting your time.

Drew Sullivan of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project at the Center for Investigative Reporting, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, writes:

A large number of editors are not setting the standards necessary to build credibility with the public in many countries. It is worthless to use new technologies to enlarge your reach unless you succeed in dealing with this basic cornerstone of journalism: credibility. Otherwise you just turn off a larger circle of readers. We should all work hard -- much harder than we are working -- at building credibility. And that starts with accuracy and fairness in every single story.

I read media around the world.  We have a crisis in credibility in the developing world.  If we want to survive in a world of expanding information sources, I think we must resolve this first before we worry about much else.

Agenda Aloysius, a Masters student in Global Journalism at the University of Orebro, Sweden, writes:

The majority of African media and the rest of the media in developing nations need to build confidence in readers so as to consolidate present readership and attract more. Afterwards, they can look forward to expanding the media. Some are making frantic efforts on this.

The problem may also revolve around reading culture. Some traditional media may have a high readership not necessarily because of very good reporting but because a reading culture had been established in those societies and people can afford those papers or have more access to internet. This culture spans over centuries.

It is extremely important that editors in Africa and other developing nations make critical efforts to get more readers. I am from Cameroon, where this is not the case. News is just what happens by accident or what is said during press conferences and the details which some call "investigative" are often based on rumours which may not be false though can hardly be proven.

Aloysius blogs here.

The latest FOMACS radio documentary is now available to listen to or podcast at RTE's Documentary on One site. Neltah Chadamoyo's programme, Neltah Tells a Love Story, was produced in the context of the FOMACS radio mentoring programme Having Your Voice Heard.

In the programme, Neltah tells the story of her sister, Melody, and a man named Taurai, growing up together in Zimbabwe. Taurai was born albino and was taunted in the street. When he first asked Melody out, she refused, but her cousin 'blackmailed' her into accepting. She fell in love with Taurai, and shared in the abuse he received for being different. They also shared a life of laughs, cooking and gardening. They came to Ireland and had a daughter, Siobhán. Then, in 2008, Melody and Siobhán lost Taurai… Neltah's story recounts their joys and struggles.

The programme was broadcast in the Curious Ear slot last Saturday. Colin Murphy's short documentary for FOMACS, on immigrant participation in the local elections, was previously broadcast in this slot, and can be found here.

Promise and Unrest, a film by Alan Grossman and Áine O'Brien of FOMACS, premiered at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival on Friday last. The film was previewed on radio on Arena on Radio One, and Áine O'Brien was interviewed last week on Radio One's Drivetime (the archive is here, but does not appear to be up to date at time of writing). A preview of the film can be seen on the film's website, here.

The film gives a rare and intimate insight into the lives of a migrant family in Ireland and their home country - in this case, the Philippines. Shot over five years, it follows Noemi Barredo, a care worker who left the Philippines in search of work when her daughter, Gracelle, was just seven months. Gracelle was left with Noemi's parents, as Noemi sought work first in Malaysia and later in Ireland. Noemi's earnings provided for her extended family in her absence, amongst other things building them a villa that contrasts sharply with the small Ranelagh bedsit in which Noemi lives in Ireland. Eventually, Noemi brought Gracelle to live with her in Ireland.

Promise and Unrest is ethnographic filmmaking, allowing the story of these people's lives to unfold with time, and with the sometimes chaotic and sometimes mundane pace of real life. While it is ostensibly about Noemi and Gracelle - both of whom emerge as strong and compelling protagonists - it could also be read as an oblique commentary on Irish culture and society. And of course the film has much to say - though never didactically - on the global regime regulating migrant labour.

The filmmakers (who are colleagues in FOMACS) are now looking to the next stage of distribution. At a Q&A after the film, Áine said they intended to develop an education pack to accompany the film in outreach work. I'll keep readers posted.

A short note on the website: the video is embedded using the popular alternative to YouTube, Vimeo. This is much the same as YouTube to use, but is higher quality. Vimeo only allows uploading of original material, and so has a more tangible community orientation than the more chaotic YouTube. For those who enjoy plunging into this kind of tech talk, there's a thorough comparison of various video sharing sites here.

The Communication Initiative network, which has been cited regularly here, has put together an online resource (or collection of resources) on crisis intervention and development in Haiti, with a focus on the communications aspects.

As they say: 'We want to provide some connections for people and organisations hoping to relate to organisations in Haiti - when communications become possible. Plus, we all know from times like this that spaces to communicate, debate, and struggle with the meaning and implications of are vitally important. We have created these spaces through The CI and include links to these spaces here below.'

The resource is here.

In Bangkok’s slums, most homes have a colour television—the average number is 1.6 per household. Almost all have fridges, and two-thirds have a CD player, washing machine and a mobile phone. Half of them have a home telephone, video player and motorcycle. This is from a 2003 UN report The Challenge of Slums, and is cited in a challenging article by environmentalist Stewart Brand (a man with an intriguing track record) in the latest issue of Prospect: How Slums Can Save the Planet.

The article is a paean to cities and their potential for both lifting people out of poverty (even in slum cities), and for boosting energy conservation and environmental protection. Brand references the UN study above:

The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”

Brand concludes:

Fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease and injustice as much as business, innovation, education and entertainment. The recent earthquake in Haiti demonstrates the danger of slum buildings. But if they are overall a net good for those who move there, it is because cities offer more than just jobs. They are transformative: in the slums, as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan, and with it everything the dictionary says that cosmopolitan means: multicultural, multiracial, global, worldly-wise, well travelled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane.

And just as this was true during the industrial revolution, so the take-off of cities will be the dominant economic event of the first half of this century too. It will involve huge infrastructural stresses on energy and food supply. Vast numbers of people will begin climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder, from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat and soy to meat—and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of it will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince them to stay in their villages. Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.

This week's Humanitarian Heads Up e-newsletter from Reuters AlertNet also looks at urbanisation.

Aid agencies will have to get urbanised, they report:

More and more vulnerable populations will settle on the outskirts of towns and cities across the globe in the next few years, a new report has found. Published by Humanitarian Futures Programme at King's College, London, and the Feinstein International Centre at Tufts University in the US called Humanitarian Horizons: A Practitioners' Guide to the Future, is one of two new reports highlighting the need for humanitarian efforts to be focus on the needs of the urban poor who have been largely been overlooked as the aid world concentrates more on rural development. The other is the World Bank's flagship Development Report 2010. About 810 million people already live in city slums, battling overcrowding, insecure tenure, landslides, flooding, poor sanitation, unsafe housing, inadequate nutrition and poor health. Humanitarian agencies will need to revise their mandates as emergency needs in urban areas have not been addressed. The World Bank report also examines the impact of climate change on urban populations. "Low-elevation coastal zones at risk from rising sea levels and coastal surges are home to about 600 million people globally, and 15 of the world's 20 megacities," it says. 

Promise and Unrest is the latest film by Alan Grossman and Áine O'Brien of FOMACS, and premieres at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival in Dublin on February 19 at 9pm at Cineworld, Parnell Street. There's a trailer here.

The film is narrated by mother and daughter, Noemi and Gracelle Barredo, from the Philippines. Separated from her daughter Gracelle at seven months, Noemi Barredo left the Philippines for work in Malaysia to support her parents and extended family, before arriving in Ireland in 2000.

According to the filmmakers, Promise and Unrest is an intimate portrayal of a migrant woman performing caregiving and long-distance motherhood, while assuming the responsibility of sole provider for her family back in the Philippines.

Dublin may be a long way from Noemi’s hometown of Babatngon, yet she retains a sharp eye on the welfare of her family, attentive to a range of small businesses she has financed, paying for the education of her daughter and son, medication for her terminally ill father and her sister’s nursing degree.

Through the camera lens, the film captures the everyday intricacies of Noemi and Gracelle’s relationship, their reunion in Ireland and the beginnings o a domestic life together in the same country for the first time.

Tickets from the festival website or at (01) 6877974. The festival runs from February 18 to 28. We'll take a closer look at the programme here next week.

The Office of the Minister for Integration has been busy sending press releases on recent initiatives and reports. Here is a quick note on a few of these.

The Canal Communities Intercultural Strategy for Youth Work

The Canal Communities are the Bluebell, Rialto, Kilmainham, Inchicore, Islandbridge areas of south west inner city Dublin. This area is one of the most ethnically diverse in the country, with 17% of residents from minority ethnic backgrounds. The Canal Communities Intercultural Centre, running since 2004, works on integration in the area - in their words, 'an integration which celebrates difference but recognises our common desire to be respected parts of a dynamic, responsible, creative and caring community'. The centre has recently published a strategy for youth work, which was launched by the Minister for Integration, John Curran TD. Curran said he was 'very aware of the importance of focussing on younger immigrants and activities which encourage their greater participation in the community. Ensuring that migrant youth reach their full potential and feel part of the community is crucial not only for first generation migrants but, as international experience has shown, in some cases for second and third generations.'

In the Front Line of Integration: Young People Managing Migration to Ireland

A total of 169 young people aged 15-18 took part in this national study through participation in focus groups across the country. The study covered issues such as adjustment to life in Ireland, school life, links with their cultural heritage, relations with Irish young people, work and further study in Ireland and their experience of racism.

According to Minister John Curran, who launched the report, 'We can see from the research that many of the young people interviewed are ambitious and highly motivated to avail of the opportunities which Ireland offers them.'

Curran also noted that the demand for integration initiatives had not fallen with the drop off in immigration and rise in return-migration. 'In fact, at post primary level, the numbers increased slightly, he said. 'It is clear that the need for integration is not diminishing and reports like this remain important.'

The project was funded through the European Integration Fund and run by the Trinity Immigration Initiative and the Integration and Social Inclusion Centre. Download it here.

The OECD Report on Migrant Education in Ireland

The report presents policy options designed to respond to the main challenges, which the OECD has identified for Ireland in five key areas:

Early childhood education and care
School – primary and post-primary
Partnership and engagement – particularly with parents
Access to quality education
Data collection for evaluation and feedback.

John Curran said the report would inform the development of the Intercultural Education Strategy expected this spring.

The documentary film about life in the Irish accommodation centre for asylum seekers at Mosney, Seaview, is now available to buy on DVD/download. Seaview had a good run on the festival circuit and was nominated in last year's IFTAs (Irish Film and Television Awards) for best documentary. It also had a theatrical release in Germany. It was directed by Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley.

According to Nick Gogan, 'Every Irish person remembers spending holidays at Mosney and it's incredible to see this familiar setting that still seems to resonate with so many of our pasts now used for a different purpose. The residents of Mosney each have their own story to tell, from the tragic to the heartwarming.'

As one resident of the centre says in the film: 'Do you know what it means to leave everything you have as a human being and come to a country where you are a total stranger? I mean, it's not something you just wake up and decide to do.' 

You can watch a trailer here, listen to an interview with the filmmakers here, download press materials here, and buy the film on DVD or download from Indiepix, here.

International Mother Tongue Day may be a mouthful, but it's an interesting initiative to celebrate linguistic diversity. It will be celebrated this year in Tallaght, Dublin, on Saturday February 20, by a new group, Bilingual Forum Ireland.

They will bring researchers, teachers, families and community workers together on the 20th, from 10am to 1pm at the Red Rua Art Centre in Tallaght (just by the Tallaght Luas stop) for a plenary session followed by the presentation of projects and a discussion.

Bilingual Forum Ireland is a group of researchers from universities across Ireland that aims to raise awareness about bilingual issues. They offer free information sessions and workshops and seminars on bilingualism to parents, teachers and community groups, and have an online forum. Amongst the discussions online is one on foreign-language playgroups, with details of various facilities for children in various languages.

Contact them at bilingualforumireland[at]gmail.com (replace [at] with @ - this is a convention to minimise spam).

A new analysis of the direct provision system of accommodation for asylum seekers in Ireland will be launched on February 18. ‘One Size Doesn’t Fit All’: Legal analysis of the direct provision and dispersal system in Ireland, 10 years on is published by FLAC (Free Legal Advice Centres) and updates and elaborates on some of the key concerns about the system of direct provision and dispersal identified in FLAC's 2003 publication, Direct Discrimination? (download here). The new report will examine the system of direct provision in the context of government policy, domestic law and international human rights standards.

The launch will be accompanied by a screening of the digital stories Living in Direct Provision, produced by FOMACS with Integrating Ireland and the Refugee Information Service. The launch is at 11am on the 18th in Buswell’s Hotel, Dublin. Contact campaigns[at]flac.ie.

The launch is also intended to mark the UN World Day of Social Justice on 20 February.

Incidentally, FLAC has recently launched an online audio archive to mark its 40th anniversary, for which I conducted a series of interviews with a range of people involved in FLAC over the years, including some of the founder members.

The Loon Lounge is a social-networking website for prospective and existing immigrants to Canada. Founder and immigration lawyer David Cohen saw, according to the Toronto Star, "a need for a social networking site that uses common applications to create a worldwide chat room for people thinking of moving to Canada, people in the process of moving and people already [there]."

The aim is to connect new migrants both to native-born Canadians and to other immigrants in the country. Users can join communities based on common ties - like country of origin and occupation - and common interests - there are skiing and drama interest groups, for example.

From his experience in his own work with immigrants, Cohen observed that "those with contacts and support in Canada are better equipped to establish themselves than those who try to make it on their own."  Hence the establishment of the Loon Lounge, a site he calls, according to the Globe and Mail, "Facebook with a purpose". It is "the missing link - a tool to help people make connections and build a support system to help ease their transition into life in Canada...By facilitating communication and centralizing member information, the purpose of LoonLounge is to empower Canadian residents, immigrants, and potential immigrants with the knowledge we need to build a stronger Canada together." 

As of November 2009 the site had 30,000 members who use the site to network, learn about Canada, search for jobs, post events, and to access resources about settlement and citizenship in the country.

It's an excellent initiative - as Cohen told the Toronto Star, “I know our government means well, but their efforts are, well, oafish. The government can’t afford to answer one-on-one questions, they can’t help an engineer in Norway find someone in Toronto who can answer his question or tell someone in Greece where to find Toronto’s Greek neighbourhood.” His comments could as well apply to the Irish case as the Canadian.

www.loonlounge.com

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

According to figures released by the HSE and reported in the Irish Times on February 1st, 500 unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Ireland have gone missing from State care since 2000. 47 children went missing in 2007, according to Denis Naughten, Fine Gael's spokesman on immigration and integration.

Swiss charity Terre des Hommes released a report, also on February 1st, into the phenomenon of unaccompanied minors disappearing in four countries in the EU (download here). They found that up to half of foreign minors arriving in particular reception centres in Switzerland, Belgium, France and Spain disappear within 48 hours of admission. They say: "The disappearance of children from institutions is not a marginal or rare phenomenon: it is a variable but significant percentage of a given population which can reach 50% depending on the institutions or countries concerned."

One of the most decisive factors in the disappearance of these children, they say, is the fact of their being placed into State care in the first place: "Most minors (mainly boys between 14 and 17 years of age) perceive their future prospects once it is decided that they be placed in an institution. What does being placed and protected mean to minors who have often been through extreme hardships, who have been forced to reach a degree of adult maturity, and of whom it is required that they comply with the rules and regulations of an institution normally designed for younger minors? There is also their certainty, even if they are told otherwise, that this placement is the anteroom of eviction back to their country of origin, despite the fact that their projects are usually very clear and that they want to work in the host country."

Disturbingly, the Terre des Hommes report observes that, "the principle of actively searching for a minor who has disappeared from an institution is very rarely implemented, in contrast to the immediate search which is initiated when a national child disappears. This attitude could very easily be interpreted as discrimination."

In Ireland, the Ombudsman for Children's Office (OCO) recently released the results of their Separated Children Project (1), which ran from January to October 2009, and which aimed " to better understand the lives and level of care afforded to separated children in Ireland by hearing directly from them." The project resulted in a guidebook compiled by the 35 separated children who participated and a storybook setting out their stories, as well as a project report. (All are available for download here). The OCO report echoes the findings of Terre des Hommes, saying: "[The] large number of missing children is alarming as is the apparent lack of further investigation into incidents. Minister Barry Andrews stated earlier this year that, 'We wish to treat all unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the same way as all children in the State are treated.' Yet, the majority of missing separated children are not listed on the missing persons website."

The stories gathered as part of the Separated Children's project are frequently harrowing, and bring into sharp relief the need for the State to make every effort to ensure separated children who arrive in Ireland are well cared for and looked out for, and every effort is made to find those who go missing. The editors introduce the collection by saying, "We all make our own stories. But our stories also make us.  In their home places, these extraordinary children were unconsciously shaping their own stories with their families when dramatic events tore apart their lives. At that moment their stories began to shape them. They shaped them in ways they never imagined or wanted. Now, on these pages, and through this project, they have become their own stories’ tellers...These stories are sacred. And here is their airing. They are sacred to the children who own them. They are sacred to the children’s home countries. And now, whether we acknowledge it or not, they are sacred to Ireland. To each one of us who reads them. These are Irish stories too."

An extract:
"We came to Dublin Airport. I didn’t know it was Dublin then.  I had never known of Dublin. I had never known of Ireland. We got on a bus and into the city centre somewhere maybe and then he just left us...It was really cold. It was in October last year and we didn’t have jackets on us and we had just, yeah, a small bag with our few clothes and small things inside. We went in this big building. They got an interpreter for us. We was afraid and confused. My younger brother was talking because I couldn’t talk in that time ever since those things were happened to me in the past, when they tried raping me. That pains, the pain never stop. I couldn’t talk in that time because I was breathing too fast. My chest was very painful.
They are strange to me and I feel strange to them. I have nothing more to say. I finished saying, I’m just sad. It’s just hard for me, it’s really hard for me, and sometimes I feel like doing something bad but it is no way to go on. "

(1) Note: the OCO uses the word 'separated' rather than 'unaccompanied' because, they say, "This term is preferable to ‘unaccompanied’ because it better defines the problems that such children face. Namely, that they are without the care and protection of their parents or legal guardian and as a consequence suffer socially and psychologically from this separation. While some separated children appear to be accompanied when they arrive, the accompanying adults are not necessarily able or suitable to assume responsibility for their care."

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

Recent research by the US based Opportunity Agenda (www.opportunityagenda.org) (download here) looked into the utilisation of social media platforms - Facebook, Youtube, blogs and Twitter - by pro-immigration advocacy groups as well as the presence of content supportive of and sympathetic to immigrants and immigration in these fora.

They conducted a ten week scan of the sites above over the summer of 2009, and contrasted their findings with a similar scan conducted in 2007. They justify the research by saying, "In just a few short years, we have witnessed a transformation in the most popular technologies and uses of the Internet. That change, in turn, is reshaping the media landscape and the public discourse...For those who seek commonsense immigration reform and the integration of immigrants into our national community, a robust and positive experience on the social web is crucial. Because Americans of all walks of life increasingly use these sites to learn about issues and build relationships, the information they encounter will shape their views and influence the broader public’s perceptions."

Summarising their findings, they say: "We found an almost complete turnaround from the results of our last Web 2.0 scan conducted approximately two years ago. We saw positive developments on Facebook and YouTube, and we found progressive-leaning mainstream blogs to be a friendlier environment for pro-immigration discourse than just two years ago."

In 2007, the group found anti-immigrant groups outnumbering pro- by approximately two to one on Facebook. In 2009, searching for the keywords "immigration, immigrant, dream Act, Comprehensive Reform, amnesty, undocumented, and illegals" and limiting their analysis to groups with more than 100 members, they found 92 immigrant related Facebook groups, of which 76 had a pro-immigrant message (note: it is unclear from the methodology section if they were just searching within US networks or globally - it seems likely, given the small numbers involved, it was only within the US. A quick search of Facebook for 'immigration+America', 'Common Interest' groups with the subtype 'Beliefs and Causes' threw up 146 groups in February 2010, which would suggest Opportunity Agenda used something like this methodology, though they do not specify). Of 15 fan pages scanned, 11 had a pro-immigrant message.

They point out that the most successful groups on Facebook (measured by number of members) were those related to advocating for the passage of the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Minors) Act. They speculate that, "An important reason for this was the ability of these groups to consistently update their content and have active members routinely post information and news related to the DREAM Act... Members often need to see the vibrancy of a group before they will participate. Once they do, these members’ networks see this activity and learn of the group. It is this cycle, we believe, that led to much of the success seen by these groups."

On Youtube, they found content that was supportive of immigrants and immigration slightly outnumbering content that was anti-immigration, although they do note that many of the comments under videos they categorised as 'pro-immigration' were "laden with offensive, anti-immigration rhetoric".

Looking at a list of the top 100 blogs on Technorati (globally rated), the researchers chose "the first 10 that consistently covered issues of political relevance...The Huffington Post, Think Progress, DailyKos, the Daily Dish, the CNN Political Ticker, Michelle Malkin, The Caucus of The New York Times, Gawker, Pajama Media, and TreeHugger." They say that, " only the progressive blogs we monitored (such as The Huffington Post, DailyKos, and Think Progress) discussed immigration topics on a consistent basis. More conservative blogs (Pajama Media and Michelle Malkin) blogged less than five times each on the topic of immigration throughout our 10-week scan and mainly in response to what was popular in immigration news at [that] moment." Despite this, their conclusions are upbeat: "Blogs continue to increase in popularity...In comparison to our scan two years ago, the progress that pro-immigrant voices have made in this space is striking."

On Twitter, they found that amongst those users who tweet frequently on immigration issues, pro-immigration voices are predominant.

Their final conclusion is optimistic, in particular with regard to the success of pro-immigrant voices in the social media sphere in the US, and their yoking of social media tools to their cause. They advise: "It is not enough for us to simply create content for these technologies. We must take advantage of the freedom inherent in these tools. The technology allows us to be precise about how we frame our argument....This is an opportunity to produce and present our content unfiltered. The findings of this report show a promising start, but we must not relinquish our current lead. The social web is wildly popular and we have no reason to believe that will change. We must use it to our advantage."

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

Congolese musician Niwel Tsumbu and his Song of the Nations band are touring Ireland throughout February and March. The guitarist has been described by the Irish Times as having "an almost hyper-articulate ability to fuse and sunder, meld and saturate his music with naturally kinetic African rhythms, jazz improvisation and the most disciplined flamenco guitar imaginable."

The Song of Nations band is "a truly multicultural line up" made up of Hungarian bassist Peter Erdei, Irish percussionist Eamonn Cagney, violinist Kathryn Doehner from Germany and Cuban percussionist Frailan Moran Mendive.

Tsumbu's latest album, Song of the Nations, was released to rave reviews last April (again from the Irish Times: "Tsumbu’s confident juxtaposition of clarinet and guitar, insistent percussion and declamatory vocals trace a path that’s all his own...the final, hidden track...hollers from the mountaintop: its tribal rhythms and transcendent male harmonies declare Tsumbu’s intention to carve a niche nobody else has even dreamt of.")

Tsumbu arrived in Cork from the Congo in 2004, and has played with a number of different groups since then, including the Dublin based Detached group, the Niwel Tsumbu Duo, Sumu and the Clear Sky Ensemble, and has toured extensively, featuring on the bill at such diverse events as the Electric Picnic, the Festival of World Cultures and the Cork Jazz Festival.

He has studied both African music and jazz, and those influences fuse in his work. As Rootsworld puts it, "rich Lingala roots merge with jazz, classical and popular music in an acoustic tour de force of rhythm, melody and tight, terse vocals."

Niwel Tsumbu and Song of the Nations play St John's Arts Centre, Kerry, on 11th February. For more tour details see here.

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe  - recently published and described as a collection of autobiographical essays, is only loosely the latter. As Geoff Wisner, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, says, "Of the 16 essays and speeches included here, the most directly autobiographical – 'My Dad and Me' and 'My Daughters' – are among the briefest."

Wisner goes on: "If The Education of a British-Protected Child doesn’t tell us much that is new about Achebe’s life, it does tell us a lot about his views on other matters." As The New York Times puts it, "In this book he tangles further, and profitably, with the obsessions that have defined his career: colonialism, identity, family, the uses and abuses of language."

Particularly interesting is a reprint of Achebe's essay 'Africa's Tarnished Name', (originally published in 2000), itself an extended version of a 1975 essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness titled 'Images of Africa'. That latter is a bitter analysis of what Achebe argues is Conrad's intense racism in Heart of Darkness and the lasting legacy of that writer's (quoting F.R. Leavis) "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery" in describing the continent.

Achebe: "In the final consideration his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present edition: a) it was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention and b) The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc., etc."

In 'Africa's Tarnished Name' Achebe observes, "It is a great irony of history and geography that Africa, whose land mass is closer than any other to the mainland of Europe, should come to occupy in European psychological disposition the farthest point of otherness, should indeed become Europe's very antithesis."

He argues that Europe's perception of the alienness and otherness of Africa "was in general a deliberate invention" whose purpose was to allow, first, for the slave trade, and second, for the colonisation of the continent. The 'derogatory images' of Africa generated by this perception of alienness, he says, "gave the world a literary tradition that is now, happily, defunct, but also a particular way of looking (or rather not looking) at Africa and Africans that endures, alas, into our own day."

Achebe was writing in 2000, but 'our own day' as well describes 2010. A Google news search for 'africa "dark continent"' turns up four pages of results from just the past month - many, it is true, along the lines of "Some people still see Africa as 'the dark continent...", but indicative, despite their jaundiced tone, of the persistence of the myth given its literary imprimatur by Conrad.

While slightly hyperbolic, Rod Chavis in 'Africa in the Western Media' gives a good summary of this legacy: “Nouns and adjectives like hut, dark, tribe, King Kong, tribalism, primitive, nomad, animism, jungle, cannibal, savage, underdeveloped, third world, developing, etc., are pervasive when Africa is the story. Images of Africa in the Western Media, many times, are deeply troubling psychologically and emotionally, especially to those claiming her as primordial heritage, lineage, and descendancy. They portray a no there there: no culture, no history, no tradition, and no people, an abyss and negative void.

“With the stroke of a journalist's pen, the African, her continent, and her descendants are pejoratively reduced to nothing (but)… a bastion of disease, savagery, animism, pestilence, war, famine, despotism, primitivism, poverty, and ubiquitous images of children, flies in their food and faces, their stomachs distended. These "universal" but powerfully subliminal message units, beamed at global television audiences, connote something not good, perennially problematic unworthiness, deplorability, black, foreboding, loathing, sub humanity, etc.”

While the Western media's confused and flat-footed approach to describing events and life on the African continent is hardly news, this collection of essays is worthwhile both for the historical overview of European narratives of Africa it offers, and for the blade concealed within Achebe's scholarly tone, one which methodically (and sometimes savagely) deconstructs these narratives.

And although many of the essays in The Education of a British-Protected Child are a decade or more old, and the subjects they deal with many decades older, they still remain (incredibly, depressingly) relevant.  In 'Spelling Our Proper Name' Achebe writes, “The telling of the story of black people in our time, and for a considerable period before, has been the self-appointed responsibility of white people, and they have mostly done it to suit a white purpose, naturally….So much psychological, political and, economic interest is vested in the negative image.”

This is not the whole truth, of course, but the following elegant passage (from 'Images of Africa') gives a good summation of Europe's difficulty in 'storying' Africa: "As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray - a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate."

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

There's been no shortage of coverage of the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, with both improved reporting and analysis of the humanitarian and security situations a key feature or more recent reporting. Here is an eclectic selection of further links to commentary, reportage and resources that may be of interest.

In the New York Times: two excellent articles, one about the relief efforts of Haitians themselves:

'At the University of Haiti, professors summoned students by text messages and deputized them to serve as trauma counselors for a shocked population. “The state is broken, the people are broken, but it is time to mobilize,” said Tirone Joël, 24, a psychology student. “We can sit back and wait for help from our friends abroad, or we can use our own talents and take charge of one little corner of this situation.”'

Another by Haitian novelist Évelyne Trouillot on solidarity in Haiti:

'No, I am not watching the news. I am too busy trying to find a way to keep my hope alive because the work in front of us is humongous. I am busy rejoicing in the laughter of the children in the camp near our house, smiling at the comical reactions of a passer-by after a recent aftershock. I am busy shedding tears at the news of a miraculous rescue of six students from the wreckage of a university building. I am busy collecting the fragments of life that reflect the enormous courage and resilience among us.

'I am busy loving life and my country.'

The New Yorker features an article by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat and an 'ask the author' Q&A with her

(The two Haitian writers above come together in this interview with Trouillot by Danticat, from 2005.)

I wrote a critical piece about the reporting of roadblocks of corpses in Haiti for Prospect (developing some of the thoughts outlined here last week). There's a more nuanced and sensitive story of one such roadblock in the LA Times.

The UN ReliefWeb site has a useful archive of key UN documents on the crisis response in Haiti.

CNN's iReports provide an opportunity for the network to 'crowd-source' news. They've used that forum for posting reports on missing persons, and for 'citizen journalism' from Haiti - though in the case of this diary of the work of a San Diego volunteer 'rescue team', I suspect that this is less citizen journalism and more freelance-journalism-for-free.

The immigration reform lobby America's Voice has an article on Obama's granting of Temporary Protected Status to Haitian immigrants in the US, which includes a useful roundup of some of the anti-Haitian commentary and 'xenophobic sentiment' commentary in the US media. The article concludes with a restatement of America's Voice's core belief, backed up by research: 'Recent polling shows that the majority of Americans want to see a pragmatic, common-sense solution that fixes our immigration crisis: comprehensive immigration reform. In fact, a series of polls conducted in November 2008, May 2009, and December 2009 show that the American people want Congress to tackle the issue, and are strongly in favor of a comprehensive proposal that puts undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship if they register, pay taxes, and meet other criteria. In other words, most Americans support a bipartisan solution that's in line with our nation's values.'

American National Public Radio also has a report on the temporary protection issue.

The Refugees United website (refunite.org) went live in November 2008. Founded by Danish brothers David and Christopher T. Mikkelsen, it aims to harness the power of online social networking technologies to facilitate contact between refugees and family and friends they have been separated from. Essentially, it is a searchable database of refugees, who upload their details themselves, obviating the need for the involvement of any third-party. Many refugees, fleeing persecution, or having crossed borders illegally, are wary of posting their details online, so the site allows them list in their profiles personal markers - nicknames, scars, birthmarks and so on - known only to family and friends in order to preserve their anonymity.

The brothers were inspired to set up the site by a meeting with a young Afghan refugee called Mansour in 2005. Mansour had lost contact with his family and friends aged 12. Say the Mikkelsens: 'No government organization was able to unearth any information on Mansour's family, and only after traveling back to Pakistan, bribing his way, did he learn that his entire family had been split up and scattered across the globe. An almost impossible mission of gathering information and traces began - without the slightest knowledge of the family's whereabouts'.

They eventually tracked down Mansour's brother, who was in Russia, and the experience inspired them to try and do the same thing for more refugees. Thus the establishment of Refunite.org - 'a global search engine based on self-sufficiency and anonymity'. There is no central registry to provide interlinked communication between refugees and their loved ones, and many refugees are afraid of contacting authorities. Refugees United aims to become just such a central registry, facilitating communication without the need for the intercession of a third-party.

Talking to Spiegel Online David Mikkelsen said,"We didn't want to be the kind of NGO (non-governmental organisation) that is a third party providing help to refugees. We wanted to give them the opportunity to take control of their situations and help themselves - and give NGOs another tool to help."

Obviously, a major obstacle in the path of the site's success is the fact that many refugees do not have ready access to the internet. To this end, reports Newsweek, Refugees United has undertaken a number of pilot programmes to place computer terminals in the midst of large refugee populations in Egypt and Brazil. They hope to encourage major computer companies to donate computers to the cause, according to ABC News, and are also working on a mobile platform to allow access to the site from mobile phones.

In the same Spiegel Online interview quoted above Christopher said: "It's really just another search engine. But the fact that it is specifically intended to help refugees find their families makes it a beacon. It is about helping the refugees and helping those people trying to help refugees."

www.refunite.org

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

February 9th sees African American dance theatre company Soul Steps perform in the Axis theatre, Ballymun. They say: 'Soul Steps embraces step dance as a medium to tell stories of culture and community'. Using their entire bodies as percussive instruments, they trace the history of stepping from the South African gold mines of the 1880s, and the slave plantations in the United States, to today’s African American fraternities and sororities.

Step dance originated in its modern form the African American fraternities and sororities aforementioned - with Howard University in Washington D.C. in particular being crucial in its development. Jacqui Malone, in Steppin on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance describes the form as featuring 'synchronised, precise, sharp and complex rhythmical body movements combined with singing, dancing and verbal play. It requires creativity, wit and a great deal of physical skill and co-ordination...the goal of each (step) team is to command the audience with stylistic elements derived primarily from African-based performance traditions'. She goes on, quoting Robert Abrahams: '(Stepping) is a uniquely African-American dance genre that was created in the United States but is..."animated by the style, spirit and social and aesthetic organisation of sub-Saharan Africa"'.

Elizabeth Fine, in Soulstepping: African American Step Shows, calls the dance form 'a ritual performance of group identity' and 'a vibrant arena for the display of African American verbal and nonverbal art'. For Fine, this 'nonverbal' element is important, and she draws on the work of Sally Ann Ness in Body, Movement and Culture to place stepping within an attempt to 'return bodily experience as a form of consciousness and understanding to a central place within the discipline of ethnographic inquiry' - something she says has been lacking from Euro-American thinking. Stepping can offer a real and definite reading of African American culture, says Fine, because 'Just as one may 'read' material and verbal culture: (quoting Ness) "even the simplest gesture can make visible a culture's most cherished and carefully shaped relationships"'.

As well as reflecting cultural traditions, stepping, according to Fine, is part of a broader tradition whereby rapid cultural change engenders a melding of contemporary and heritage elements to create new identity markers. 'With the homogenisation and cultural levelling of the 'global village' cultural identities become fluid and negotiable. In response to tensions caused by rapid cultural change, persons often construct identities through syncretic performances that combine traditions of the past with contemporary cultural expressions'. The 'rapid cultural change' experienced by black students attending predominantly white colleges and universities, combined with the ravages of global homogenisation, she says, go some way to explaining the emergence and subsequent popularity of stepping as a dance form.

Whatever the putative explanations for its development, stepping is a high octane and exhilarating experience - as this excerpt from Spike Lee's 1988 film Schooldaze, shows. To watch Soul steps in action click here. They perform in the Axis, Ballymun, at 8pm, Tuesday, 9th February.

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

A survey undertaken by students at Donabate Community College as part of the BT Young Scientists' Competition and reported in the Fingal Independent on 20th January suggests that the recession is having a disproportionate impact on Ireland's immigrant population. Of the sample the students studied, they found an unemployment rate of 46% amongst male, and 36% amongst female immigrants. The sample they used was small, so the results may be slightly skewed by a variety of factors, but figures released by the CSO for December 2009 do show a higher rate of unemployment amongst non-Irish than Irish nationals - with the former group recording an unemployment rate of 17% as against a rate of 11% for Irish nationals. Both the CSO and the Donabate students noted that the greatest decline in employment for non-nationals was in the construction sector.

A report by the British Migration Policy Institute from September 2009 (available for download here) highlights the Europe-wide implications of global recession for migrants. On the subject of employment pre-recession they have this to say: 'Broadly, in Anglo-Saxon countries (the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland), in Japan and in the Middle Eastern oil-exporting countries, unemployment among migrants was low - often below natives; however, so were wages'. The report also makes the point that, 'Conventional wisdom suggests that immigrants are the last hired and first fired in the workplace. Available data confirm this notion — especially in the countries that have been worst hit by the recession. Immigrants disproportionately possess the demographic characteristics of workers who are most vulnerable during recessions. They tend to be less skilled and less formally educated, relatively young, and recent labor-market entrants. Many immigrants work in economic sectors like construction and lower-value-added manufacturing that have been the hardest hit by the downturn. It is not surprising, then, that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that unemployment rates for immigrants are rising faster than, and exceed, those of native-born workers in many developed nations' - all of which seems to confirm the Irish experience. 

The report also goes into the effects of the global recession on patterns of migration globally. It concludes that while the movement of economic migrants to the major immigrant receiving regions of the world has slowed, it also shows that 'counter to popular perception' immigrants are tending to stay in their adopted countries, rather than return home, despite the high rates of unemployment aforementioned.

The response of many governments to the recession has been to tighten requirements for admission to their countries, or to ramp up efforts to deport illegal migrants. 'Confronted with the most severe economic crisis in decades and rising unemployment, governments in locations across the globe embraced a range of policies to suppress the inflow of migrants, encourage their departure, and protect labor markets for native-born workers'.

While the report does not deal specifically with Ireland in this instance, this country does seem to be adhering to these global trends. The number of deportations from Ireland in 2009 - 236 - was almost double that of the previous year, when 129 people were deported.  An Irish Times piece from September 2009 states: 'Officials concede that the increased activity (in deportations) is largely down to the pressure being exerted on the immigration and asylum divisions – together one of the largest areas of expenditure in the Department of Justice – to make savings'.

Similarly, the number of asylum applications processed by the State has dropped - from 3,866 in 2008 to 2,689 in 2009. Back in 2002, the State processed 11,634 applications. Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern has credited the drop off in asylum applications to Ireland's changed economic circumstances, saying, 'Information available to us suggests that many asylum applicants are economic migrants. Therefore it is possible that economic conditions in Ireland may have been a factor in the reduction in asylum application numbers in 2009'.

Speaking to the Irish Times, Roisin Boyd of The Irish Refugee Council added another possible reason for the drop-off: '"The reasons that applications for asylum to Ireland appear to have dropped are numerous, including increased security making it harder for asylum seekers to access EU territory – leading to what has been described as 'Fortress Europe'"'.

The real reason for the drop off in asylum applications is probably a combination of many factors, but certainly the economy and increased security around the EU are playing a part. Although here the MPI report is looking at illegal migration, the issues around 'Fortress Europe' still pertain for those seeking asylum:

'It is hard to disentangle the impact of the recession on illegal migration from that of increased enforcement. Besides a significant reduction in labor demand in economic sectors that traditionally employ migrant workers, such as construction and manufacturing, many EU Member States also have reinforced their internal measures against employers of illegal migrants while stepping up their use of return programs, enforcing residence laws more strictly, and stiffening border controls.'

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

The results of the Cosmopolitan Cosmology project funded by the Arts Council of Ireland through the Artist in the Community scheme and managed by Create in partnership with Sherkin Island Development Society are now available to view online.

Sherkin Islanders, their friends, family and members of the Sherkin Diaspora were given pin-hole cameras to create solargraphs between the summer and winter solstice 2009. After that, they were sent back to artist Sheelagh Broderick to be developed.

According to solargraphy.com, solargraphy is 'a photographic method for recording the paths of the Sun. Solargraphy is the art of pinhole photography. Solarigraphics or solargraphs are pinhole photographs taken with a lensless pinhole camera with a long exposure. By doing so the invisible movements of the sun can be made visible in landscapes'. 

The project aimed to explore space and time through the process of solargraphy, and to try and forge deeper links between those still on the island and those who have left. The results are quite beautiful. Check them out here.

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, 'Female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), also known as female circumcision, female genital cutting (FGC), and female genital mutilation (FGM), involves the cutting or alteration of the female genitalia for social rather than medical reasons'.

A 2007 UNFPA statement, puts at between 120 and 140 million the number of women who have been subjected to the practice and says that 3 million girls are affected each year. A 2008 joint statement from Benita Ferrero-Waldner, EU Commissioner for External Relations and Neighbourhood Policy and Louis Michel, EU Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, states that the practice is prevalent in 28 African countries, a few Arab and Asian countries and among some African immigrants in Europe and the US. FGM has been criminalised in fourteen African countries. While most countries have legislation in place prohibiting FGM, actual enforcement this prohibition is difficult, they say, in particular in rural areas. The UNFPA statement says that '(FGM) violates the basic rights of women and girls and seriously compromises their health, posing risks during childbirth, and leaving lasting physical and psychological scars'.

The UN factsheet on FGM points out that the practice is not required by any religion, and is a tradition 'designed to preserve virginity, ensure marriageability, and contain sexuality'. In March 2008 the UN issued an interagency statement - including submissions from, amongst others, UNESCO and the UNHCR - expressing commitment to supporting governments, communities, women and girls to abandon the practice within a generation.

While the UK introduced legislation to combat FGM in 2003, Ireland still has no specific legislation against it. A National Action Plan on FGM was launched in 2008. The goals of the plan are, according to The National Women's Council of Ireland, 'to prevent the practice of FGM in Ireland, to provide high quality, appropriate healthcare and support for women and girls who have undergone FGM. It also endeavours to contribute to the worldwide campaign to end FGM'. Research carried out by Akidwa in 2008 put at 2,500 the number of women in Ireland who have suffered FGM.

An International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM has been held annually on 6th February since 2003. That a day marking opposition to the practice should be held annually was first suggested by The Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children. This year, for the first time, an event to mark the day will be held in Dublin. Organised by Ireland's National Plan of Action to Address Female Genital Mutilation Steering Committee - whose members include Amnesty International (Irish section), Barnardos, Cairde, the Refugee Information Service and many more (see here for a full list) - a free seminar will be held in the European Public Information Centre, Dublin 2 on February 4th, from 10am to 1.30pm. Beyond marking the day, the aim is to provide a forum for discussion on work in Ireland and overseas to combat FGM. Admission is free.

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

An article in this month's Foreign Policy magazine by Justin Vaisse summarises and debunks the theses that underlie what he describes as 'the strange new genre' of Eurabia literature. The word 'Eurabia' was popularised by the Egyptian born, British author Bat Ye'or, who wrote what Vaisse says is 'one of the first of the genre' - Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis in 2005. Eurabian literature takes as its fundamental premise the idea that Europe is facing a demographic time-bomb, as declining birthrates among 'native' Europeans, coupled with massive immigration from Muslim countries, is leading to the decline of Europe's Western identity. Vaisse quotes Mark Steyn in America Alone: 'native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic...Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation'.

The books that make up the genre - from Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe to Steyn's America Alone - tend to be polemical rather than grounded in fact. As David Goodhart says of Caldwell's book: 'He is not seeking to be balanced and reasonable. This is a declamatory, polemical work and no more so than in its treatment of Islam. In fact, the book is really two essays - one an insightful probing of Europe's confusion about postwar immigration; the other a rather cartoonish polemic about the potential Islamic takeover of Europe.'

Caldwell - by contrast to the studiedly hyperbolic Steyn - has some intellectual heft, so the demolition of the more 'cartoonish' elements in the New York Review of Books by Malise Ruthven is worth quoting at length:

'He flatly ignores evidence produced by numerous scholars such as Aziz al-Azmeh, Tariq Modood, Philip Lewis, and Jytte Klausen that Muslim identities are shifting to meet changing circumstances, that a majority of younger British Muslims, for example, "share many aspects of popular youth culture with their non-Muslim peers," and that their problem is not so much with the majority culture as with "traditionally-minded parents who seek, usually unsuccessfully, to limit their access to it."

Caldwell pours scorn on writers who emphasize the diversity of the Islamic traditions in Europe. "For all its pleasing glibness," he says, "this harping on diversity is misguided." His reading of Islam takes an essentialist perspective of a primordial religion impervious to change, as if he were oblivious of the way that essentialist views of religion have long been under sustained intellectual attack. No one remotely familiar with the work of scholars such as Aziz al-Azmeh (who ruminates on the diversities of "Islams" and "modernities") or the political scientist Jytte Klausen, whose brilliant work on European Muslims investigates emerging hermeneutics and epistemologies of faith, would dismiss them, as Caldwell does, as "glib." Al-Azmeh and his colleagues provide plenty of support to refute "the cliché," as al-Azmeh writes, "of a homogenous collectivity innocent of modernity, cantankerously or morosely obsessed with prayer, fasting, veiling, medieval social and penal arrangements,"(1) while Klausen has demonstrated convincingly that European Muslims are overwhelmingly hostile to extremism, support democratic processes, accept the duties of citizenship, and are evolving distinctively local styles of Muslim identities. (2)

Nor does Caldwell exhibit any familiarity with the rich literature describing the spread of Islam in peripheral cultures such as sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, where a religion originating in Arabia proved every bit as adept as Christianity in adjusting to local conditions. He has similarly failed to familiarize himself, even superficially, with the vast literature charting the encounter between Islam and modern Western society. In his review of Western attitudes toward Islam he prefers to celebrate the prejudices of writers such as Ernest Renan (in 1883) or Hilaire Belloc (in 1938) than to engage with significant Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal, Fazlur Rahman, Muhammed Arkoun, or Abdullahi an-Naim who might challenge his essentialist assumptions. Caldwell's "Islam" owes more to tabloid headlines than to responsible research. To borrow a phrase of Philip Lewis, it exemplifies the need for greater religious literacy in the post–September 11 era.

Nomadsland is a website that aims to curate 'the best social issue video available on the web while creating a community for filmmakers and organizations to partner on original productions'.

It was founded by David Hutchins, a filmmaker, producer and social entrepreneur specialising in news, documentaries and new media.

The idea behind the project lies in the power of the image to convey a message: 'Visual imagery, human characters, inspirational stories – these are the most potent ways of conveying an organisation’s mission. So many nonprofits and social enterprises possess incredible personal narratives, yet something is lost in the translation. A tweet or a blog posting simply do not do these stories justice'.

The emphasis is on improving the quality of online video produced by nonprofits and social enterprise organisations. To this end, they are 'advancing the idea of the “micro-documentary,” where professional storytellers help institutions tell their story with visual sophistication'.

The storytellers in question come from a global network of qualified, professional filmmakers who, say the Nomadsland team, are 'motivated by ideals first, money second'.

Another interesting project harnessing film's unique power as an advocacy tool is B'Tselem's video project. B'Tselem is 'The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories...It endeavors to document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel'.

In January 2007 it launched a camera distribution project, whereby they 'provide Palestinians living in high-conflict areas with video cameras, with the goal of bringing the reality of their lives under occupation to the attention of the Israeli and international public, exposing and seeking redress for violations of human rights'.

In June 2009 the project won a British One World Media award, given annually to an outstanding media project or organization working on the ground in the developing world which has made a real impact on the lives of those living and working around them.

A selection of videos from the distribution project can be viewed here.

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

Two days and two nights of violence in the southern Italian town of Rosarno has brought Italy's attitude to migrants to the fore once more. Beginning with what the Guardian describes as the 'apparently motiveless' shooting of two African workers it ended with the mass removal of the town's immigrant population, '1,200 of whom were whisked by bus and train to detention centers' according to the New York Times. 52 people were injured - 18 police, 14 local people and 21 immigrants, again according to the Guardian. The normally restrained Economist called the removal of the immigrants 'an ethnic clearance of Balkan swiftness, nastiness and comprehensiveness'.

Vittorio Longhi, writing in the Guardian 10th January:
'More and more migrants in Italy are reaching the end of their tether, due to the hostility caused by a political and media criminalisation campaign against the clandestini. "We must be resolute against clandestine immigration," the interior minister, Roberto Maroni - a Northern League politician - keeps on repeating like a mantra.'

He puts at 300 the number of large scale violent incidents against immigrants in Italy in the past two years. It is the fourth such incident in Calabria alone in recent years, according to Rachel Burleigh in Time. Six Africans died two years ago in fighting in the coastal town of Castel Volturno.

According to Corriere della Sera journalist Gian Antonio Stella, at the root of Italian xenophobia is a failure to interrogate its past: 'Britain has reflected on its colonial past, Germany has done the same with Nazism, but Italians still believe the myth of the Good Italian, soft colonialism and insist the racial laws of the 1930s were passed by fascists, not Italians'. Italy's colonial experiences left it ill-equipped it to deal with immigration, according to some: 'Italy's colonial period was brief, violent and filled with military defeats', says Sylvia Poggioli on NPR. She goes on: 'Lucia Ghebreghiorges, an Italian of Ethiopian origin, says many Italians still see their former colonial subjects as enemies. "This is why they are unprepared for immigration. We are part of the future of this country, but they still see us as barbarians"'.

In an editorial published in the aftermath of the Rosarno violence entitled "Italians and Racism", L'Osservatore Romano (the Vatican's semi-official weekly newspaper) also made note of a failure to come to terms with a history of xenophobia.  'Italians are still incapable of shedding their racist past. In 2010 we are still at hatred. Whether silent, intoned in mocking chants or manifest in physical action...Apart from being disgusting, reports of episodes of racism take us to the silent, savage hatred of another colour of skin that we thought we was a thing of the past...For once, the press is not over-emphasising. Take a train, walk in the park or go to a football match. There is no room for doubt. We Italians, from the North down, have never shone for our openness'.

The UN added its voice in condemning the violence in Rosarno, and also pointed out that it is reflective of an endemic problem with migration in Italy. Said rapporateurs Jorge Bustamante and Githu Muigai, 'The violence is extremely worrying since it reveals serious and deep-rooted problems of racism against these migrant workers.'

Since May, Italy has been operating a system of 'push-backs' - sending boats full of Africans en route to Sicily to Libya before they can reach shore. Vittorio Longhi points out that, 'the UN high commissioner for refugees opposed a practice that openly violates the 1951 Geneva convention on the status of refugees'. He goes on: 'A large majority of those who try to enter Europe through Italy or Malta flee from conflicts and persecutions in central and eastern Africa, and push-backs leave no chance for protection claims'.

Italy's immigration issues are complicated by the widespread exploitation of both legal and illegal immigrants by organised crime gangs. The government argues that in order to weaken the crime gangs, immigration must be tightly controlled. Reports The Journal of Turkish Weekly:
'[Interior Minsister] Roberto Maroni made clear the fight against illegal immigration would continue without let-up. He said the illegal entry into Italian territory represents the basis for the marginalisation and exploitation of foreigners and often becomes the reservoir for recruiting labourers by criminal organisations. Maroni said 42,000 immigrants were repatriated in the past two years. He added that since an agreement was reached with Libya, arrivals by boat on the Italian southern coast have dropped by 90 per cent. He added arrivals are down from more than 30,000 to just more than 3,000, mainly thanks to the government's new 'push-back' policy to Libya. Maroni also said the government plans to further intensify its fight against illegal labour in the agricultural sector as part of its plan to more effectively combat illegal immigration, black-market labour and every form of organised crime'.

Regardless of the reasoning behind the 'push-backs', government policy toward migrants seems calculated to make life as difficult for them as possible.
From individual.com:
'Rather than policies to help these migrants fit in, there is a tough stance that many say makes it harder for them to settle and integrate into Italian society and may, perversely, actually create illegality.
"Now they only issue residence permit for the period of your work contract, so if you lose your job at the end of it, you are no one," Nelly Diop, a Senegalese intercultural mediator told IPS.
"It means you are only here as a worker, not as a human being. You have no prospects to be able to plan for the future. Then they make you wait so long to have your permit. I know a man who has been waiting two years and, of course, in the meantime he has been forced to take jobs on the black market because he still doesn't have his papers.
"You don't create an integrated society like this. There are no thoughts of integration but only of exclusion and the climate is getting worse. They want to make us invisible."'

In the town of Citadella in Northern Italy, reports NPR,
'Mayor Massimo Bitonci has sharply restricted immigrants' rights to live there. His ordinance sets a high threshold: a regular work contract, a minimum income of $5,000 per family member, and a required home size that is too expensive for most immigrants.
Bitonci says the town feels besieged.
"We're very frightened by what we see around us. We write the rules here, we want to safeguard our culture," he says. "Yes, we're raising the drawbridge, and we're on the battlements to defend ourselves from external attacks."'

A statement by  Andrea Ronchi, Italy's European Affairs minister, if true, indicates an odd refusal to acknowledge Italy's reality. News24.com reports him as saying (it's not a formal statement so its veracity is not absolute):
'"In Italy, there is no racism. It does not exist. It is an accusation made by people who do not know Italy," he said on the sidelines of an informal meeting of European affairs ministers in La Granja, Spain.
"We will give them (those making the accusation) a free tour, at our expense, to show them what there is in Italy: solidarity and welcome. But it is true there is a violent phenomenon - illegal immigration," he told journalists.
"These accusations are the fruit of a left-wing culture no longer in step with citizens," he said.
"Italy is the most welcoming country in Europe, and anyone accusing us of racism is stupid."'

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

According to the Immigrant Council of Ireland this country issues an 'extraordinarily high number' of refusals to citizenship applications every year. Said senior solicitor with the ICI, Catherine Cosgrave last May: 'Figures provided in response to a Dáil question last month showed that less than 11,000 citizenship applications were received in 2008, while 3,117 certificates of naturalisation were issued and 2,795 applications were refused or deemed ineligible.
 
That means 5,912 applications were processed in 2008, with more than 47 per cent refused or deemed ineligible.
 
This is an extraordinarily high number, compared to the experience of other countries, which indicates there are serious problems with the way applications are processed, or with the the lack of clarity around eligibility, or both'.

A review of the current framework for the acquisition of Irish citizenship is currently underway, with results due to be published in the next few months.

Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern told the Dáil: 'The review will consider a wide range of issues relating to the current statutory framework as well as other administrative arrangements in the granting of citizenship. Among the issues to be considered are eligibility periods for naturalisation, appropriate language and integration tests, proposals for a citizenship ceremony, as well as methods by which the current application procedures can be improved. Many countries have adopted integration, culture and language tests along with a number of other concepts such as earned citizenship in conjunction with longer residency requirements'.

This week's Metro Éireann contains a special supplement on citizenship, published in partnership with FOMACS. It tells the stories of those who have been granted citizenship, those who are still waiting on a response to their citizenship application, and gives an insight into why the issue of citizenship is such an important one for many migrants.

Below are some excerpts.

The joys of becoming Irish
 
Immigrants share their experiences of attaining citizenship with Robert Carry
 
“I will never forget it,” says Sorina Nabors of the day she swore an oath to the Irish State and became a citizen of her adopted country.
“When I came back to my office all my colleagues were waiting for me with flowers and a wonderful present which I still have – a crystal sphere with an Irish symbol engraved in it in gold,” she beams with pride.
Naturalisation didn’t come easy to the Romanian-born Nabors, and was granted some two years after she and her then husband initially submitted their application.
The process was both lengthy and stringent for the pair, who were both working professionals with children enrolled and settled in Irish schools at the time.
Although Nabors – from the Transylvanian capital Cluj – already had residency in Ireland, she felt that securing citizenship was an important move.
“Ireland was the country in which we had been working and living, so citizenship was a very natural progression,” she says.
Nabors, who works with asylum seekers and refugees in her adopted city of Cork, sees the granting of citizenship as the icing on the cake at the end of the process of integration rather than a part the process itself.
“This is more about self-esteem,” she says. “For those who are really integrated and living like an Irish person, it is about being seen by the State as a normal citizen and knowing that from then on you will be treated as such.”
Nabors’ big day came in slightly unusual surroundings. “We were called into the courts on a day when the judge obviously had plenty of other cases to attend to,” she recalls. “There were solicitors, barristers and people who were in court on charges. It was an interesting audience.”
Also in attendance were other residents ready to get sworn in. Among them was a Somali woman with her two young boys.
“It struck me at the time that she didn’t have any English. She was going through the same process as me but her son translated when it came to swearing the oath.”
As well as facilitating easier travel and allowing Nabors to vote in general elections and referenda, her successful citizenship application would also help solidify her children’s status. At the time children had to have separate applications submitted, and it was a further year before they too received their Irish passports.
For Nabors, however, that extra step was one very much worth taking. “Everybody treats me as Irish until I open my mouth – my accent will always make the difference – but my children will have the whole package.”
Nabors feels that although applications are dealt with stringently, there is a lot that applicants can do to improve their chances of receiving a positive response.
“I would encourage people who are applying for citizenship to update their application by contacting the department whenever there is a positive change in their circumstances.”
Although Nabors has been a citizen of the Republic of Ireland for six years now, she has found her life again being impacted by the lengthy processing period.
“My fiancé, a doctor who has practiced in Ireland for the last five years, is currently waiting for a decision on his application,” she explains. As well as having problems travelling abroad for conferences and other work-related events, her fiancé‘s current status has impacted on the pair’s lives in other ways.
“We have been dreaming of a romantic trip to Paris, but it has been put on hold by bureaucratic checks.”
 
But there are plenty of other success stories. Among them is that of Vitaliy, a Ukrainian national also living in Cork. He was in Ireland five years when he applied for citizenship and, after a two-year process, he received word last year that he had been accepted.
“I was a bit nervous while I was waiting for the result,” he recalls. “I know people who had applied for it three or four years ago and still heard nothing. It’s a big lottery.”
Yet the long wait made the positive outcome all the more enjoyable.
“Physically, nothing changed,” he says. “It’s just a piece of paper that makes your life a little bit easier, but to receive it was absolutely brilliant. I was a free person; I could go wherever I wanted.”


Citizenship refusals have a damaging impact on lives - Nasc
 
By Robert Carry
 
Those wishing to secure citizenship in Ireland have to contend with a stringent application process, while refusals – sometimes handed down after a lengthy waiting period – are not uncommon.
Moreover, the reasons cited for such refusals are often particularly hard to swallow for those turned down.
“Some of the reasons given seem very trivial,” says Claire McCarthy, policy and campaigning officer at the Cork-based Nasc Immigrant Support Centre.
McCarthy has come across a number of cases where people are turned down for spurious reasons. One of the worst involved that of ‘Mohamed’, who arrived as an asylum seeker in Ireland from Afghanistan and was later granted refugee status.
“His application for citizenship was refused on the basis that he has two traffic offences, which he did not mention in his application,” says McCarthy. “He has paid fines in both cases but non-disclosure of even the most minor offence is fatal.”
Another extreme case was that of ‘Simon’, a refugee from Liberia.
“His application was refused because he was deemed not to be of good character, because he had come to the attention of gardaí,” recalls Claire.
In Simon’s case, his offences were both traffic-related: a speeding ticket, for which he paid the fine, and the ‘crime’ of ‘wholly entering a yellow box’.
The Department of Justice’s motivations in turning down applications on what can seem  like flimsy pretexts are sometimes hard to comprehend.
“These people tend to be long-term residents in Ireland,” says McCarthy, “and citizenship isn’t something that is going to affect that. They’re still going to be living and working here.”
She feels that refusal of this kind can have a damaging impact on applicants.
“To my mind, if someone is refused because they are not of good moral character, then it gives the impression that they are not considered a good citizen.
“This is only going to exclude them more and makes it less likely that someone will have a sense of civic responsibility.”
She continues: “They will end up even more alienated from the State, and so the process will have the opposite effect to the one intended.”
Worse still is that there is no direct recourse for appeal. “If you have reasonable grounds for appeal, you can start the application process off again, but it takes about two years to get a response. That is your only option.”
McCarthy believes there is a range of reasons why people apply for citizenship. “They want to feel secure – Ireland is their home now and they want that reflected in their passport. They want to be able to travel knowing that they can come back to the country that is their home.”
The advantages of giving citizenship to someone resident in Ireland for a long period are, for McCarthy, quite obvious.
“I think it has a psychological effect on people – it gives them a sense of security and I think they then feel more tied into the community around them,” she says.
“Keeping people on the edge of society really goes against all the principles of integration that are in government policy.”

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

Haiti, appropriately, continues to dominate the news. A week on, the media coverage, like the relief operation, appears to have achieved some belated balance.

In Ireland, RTE's chief news correspondent Charlie Bird reported this morning (on RTÉ's Gerry Ryan Show, here) on how the levels of unrest and violence are actually remarkably low, making a refreshing contrast with his high-pitched report earlier in the week when he described widespread looting and fears of violence, and very excitably described an apparently minor incident that he witnessed as 'pandemonium'.

At the time, Bird was merely reflecting the dominant tone of the coverage. The key stories and footage in the first days after the quake were either of looting, US military intervention, or dramatic crisis scenes, such as of operations in outdoor hospitals, or of rescues.

While each individual story may have been true, and as such merited reporting, the cumulative effect was greatly distorting: the looting achieved almost parity with the humanitarian and political stories; the US military appeared to have a far greater impact than the United Nations and combined non-governmental sector; the 'outdoor hospital' footage gave the impression that there was no organised medical aid, or intact medical service, available; and the footage of foreign rescue teams, and the United Nations statistics of numbers of those rescued, entirely neglected the extraordinary efforts of ordinary Haitians to rescue people, which clearly started before any organised rescue effort, and presumably saved many more people.

One particularly egregious example of a valid news story achieving a distorting prominence was that of supposed 'roadblocks' of bodies being mounted around Port-au-Prince. This story made headlines around the world, and fitted neatly with the prevailing tone of apocalyptic warnings of actual and looming violence. Curiously, though, there were no photos of such roadblocks that I saw.

Ironically, therefore, the story originated with a photographer, Time Magazine's Shaul Schwarz, who told other media outlets he had seen two such roadblocks on his travels in the capital. (He was interviewed by the BBC here.)

He had, however, no photographs, and no precise details. By the time the story reached the London Independent, it acquired a further veneer of authority when it was attributed to (nameless, but apparently numerous) 'eyewitnesses': 'According to eyewitnesses, some Haitians had even used corpses to set up roadblocks in the city as a protest to the delay.'

Readers are welcome to send in observations or links on Haiti and the media coverage. We'll return to this in coming weeks. Write to migrationmatters@gmail.com.

Here are some diverse further sources of information on Haiti.

A good story on the radio station, Signal FM, that survived the quake and stayed on air, becoming a crucial source of information.

Jared Diamond on why the political, economic and ecological histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti unfolded so differently - based on his international bestseller, the very readable Collapse.

One of those killed was the self-described 'geographer, politician and writer', Georges Anglade, president of the Haitian branch of PEN, the global organisation that promotes freedom of expression and literature, and a prominent intellectual in Canada also. In an obituary in the Canadian Globe & Mail, John Ralston Saul wrote that Anglade's was in many ways was a classic Canadian story of exile and commitment.

'This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story.' David Brooks in the New York Times.

The Hampstead Theatre in London will hold a fundraising evening of theatre and reading, featuring 'immediate response' plays and poems by various writers.

ReliefWeb, the humanitarian information service, also run by OCHA, is a good source of hard information (maps, statistics, etc) on the humanitarian response.

The Haiti site of the UN humanitarian coordination agency, OCHA.

The IRIN news service run by UN OCHA.

The (pre-existing) UN mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH.

As the UN warns of the possibility of up to three million people being left homeless after the Haiti earthquake, here is a look at some of the media response.

Reuters AlertNet is a key source for information and media on humanitarian crises. Haiti is currently the lead story on their home page, with a series of links, including an article on the logistical challenge facing aid agencies, and a list of what organisations are on the ground in Haiti, and how you can donate. There's also a 'live blog' featuring Twitter updates.

The online American TV & radio station, Democracy Now!, features various reports on Haiti, including a discussion on the legacy of US policy in Haiti and Naomi Klein on 'disaster capitalism' and the response to the earthquake.

As well as video and audio, Democracy Now! features transcripts of interviews, a useful feature for those who prefer to scan content.

The New York Times has a slide show from Haiti on its home page, and a photo feature comparing satellite photos of before and after the quake. The Times is also running a Twitter list, @nytimes/haiti-earthquake.

As I write, the latest update on this, ten seconds ago, is a link to this video uploaded to YouTube of a rapid response outdoors clinic. The video in itself is unremarkable, but the authenticity and immediacy is remarkable.

The Times has an interactive map and a photo feature taking a 'closer look at the destruction in Haiti', with a zoom feature providing extraordinary detail.

Another interactive feature is one allowing readers to send in photos of loved ones missing in Haiti.

Twitter is proving to be a key means of communicating from Haiti. Irish journalist Mark Little, who has recently left his job at RTE to start up an online media business, has been retweeting actively on Haiti.

One of those he has highlighted in Haitian journalist Carel Pedre.

To look at those sites, that’s not particularly surprising. Though Haiti is the lead story in the print edition of the Times, the paper's online coverage is thin and static, at least compared with other international media.  Bizarrely, Haiti doesn't feature on the Independent's home page at all, except as the third story mentioned in World News. The lead photo is of Samantha Mumba.

Irish Times columnist Elaine Byrne retweeted from Ann Curry, an American NBS news correspondent: Curry's Twitter feed records her deployment to Haiti on Wednesday and the story since then.

RTÉ’s Morning Ireland radio programme (the most listened to in the country) is also tweeting. This morning's programme is on their recently upgraded website, and features an extraordinary, gruelling eyewitness account by Yvonne Trimble.

Curiously, while Haiti is the lead story on the BBC's website and dominates the BBC News home page, RTÉ’s website leads with the standard slideshow of entertainment images. Haiti is the lead story on the RTE News site, but it features just a static print report and a poorly signposted link to Morning Ireland's coverage.

Concern Worldwide is one of the lead Irish charities in Haiti, based there for a number of years. They have a video on their website explaining their response. Their appeal for donations is here.

The Guardian's coverage is here and features this short, extremely grainy video footage showing the moment the quake struck. There's also a piece on Haiti's troubled history: 'a long descent to hell'.

Jon Henley writes: 'What has really left Haiti in such a state today, what makes the country a constant and heart-rending site of -recurring catastrophe, is its history. In Haiti, the last five centuries have combined to produce a people so poor, an infrastructure so nonexistent and a state so hopelessly ineffectual that whatever natural disaster chooses to strike next, its impact on the population will be magnified many, many times over. Every single factor that international experts look for when trying to measure a nation's vulnerability to natural disasters is, in Haiti, at the very top of the scale. Countries, when it comes to dealing with disaster, do not get worse.

'"Haiti has had slavery, revolution, debt, deforestation, corruption, exploitation and violence," says Alex von Tunzelmann, a historian and writer currently working on a book about the country and its near neighbours, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. "Now it has poverty, illiteracy, overcrowding, no infrastructure, environmental disaster and large areas without the rule of law. And that was before the earthquake. It sounds a terrible cliché, but it really is a perfect storm. This is a catastrophe beyond our worst imagination."'

There's more critical history on AlterNet, where Carl Lindskoog writes that Haiti's many years of underdevelopment and US-sponsored political turmoil made the Haitian government ill-prepared to respond to such a disaster.

The Guardian also discusses the new media coverage of Haiti in its weekly Viral Video Chart. This is a chart of the most widely disseminated online videos in the week - ie what's going viral, what videos are being recommended on Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc. Three of the videos listed deal with Haiti, and Mercedes Bunz has some astute comments on this viral media:

'The disaster of Haiti showed that social media has become an additional resource in spreading news; and it also made clear that it is often not easy to verify the material... it shows that a new role of journalists today is to fact check the rich material we have won through social media.'

The Guardian also has a piece on the use of social media by mainstream news organisations in reporting from Haiti. They suggest that CNN has the most extensive coverage of the quake, making rich use of social media.

'It's now almost two years since CNN decided officially that iReport – a section of its website where people can upload video material, with contact information – and social media should become a legitimate source for its newsgathering.

'In the Haiti crisis, CNN has published a selection of social media material, making clear what isn't verified. This user-generated content is set apart from vetted postings, which are labelled differently and used in the same way as any other verified source.

'Despite communications being down in Haiti, by yesterday evening 218 quake iReports from Haiti were sent to CNN, with 17 being vetted by CNN, and additional 212 reports of missing loved ones, with 13 of them being verified, CNN said. Two of their iReporters did live interviews.'

Miller-McCune, a US magazine devoted to making academic research more widely available has this article on the science of seismology and attempts to reach the 'Holy Grail' of 'the precise prediction of when earthquakes will occur'.

Migration Information Source links to the US Census Bureau, which has detailed 2008 data for the 535,000 foreign born in the US from Haiti; their Spotlight on Refugees and Asylees, with a feature on migrant hometown associations, which often assist in disaster relief, and the Haiti page on the World Migration Map.

News events like this pose a particular challenge for weekly and monthly magazines that have an online presence: do they divert resources to respond more quickly online, or remain relatively static online while focussing on their next print issue? The New Yorker's answer is contained in a short, elegant blog post, linking to a combination of blog posts and archive pieces. Their correspondent, Philip Gourevitch, has a short, modest proposal:

'As the public’s horror at the devastation in Haiti eclipses, for the moment, the popular outrage over the huge profits and huge bonuses being enjoyed by the big American banks that American taxpayers bailed out when they faced the abyss, here’s a thought: Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase should give a billion dollars apiece to Haiti relief and reconstruction efforts—and they should do it swiftly and without hesitation. They should do it today, before they start cutting bonus checks. It would do them good, and it would do good.'

This week, in the final issue of Migration Matters before the Holidays, we mark International Migrants Day with a look at Radio 1812, in which FOMACS is participating, and a round up of recent and forthcoming FOMACS projects. The next issue of Migration Matters will be published on January 14, 2010. You can subscribe to the email edition here. In the meantime, we wish you Seasons Greetings and good luck in the new year, and in particular, to all those travelling, a safe journey.

Today is International Migrants Day and for this week's Migration Matters we'll be looking at the Radio 1812 initiative and FOMACS's own current projects.

Radio 1812 is essentially a global radio marathon that coincides with International Migrants Day, with the aim of bringing stories from migrants to radio audiences across the world. In 2008, 175 radio stations from 48 countries took part. This year, FOMACS is amongst them.

FOMACS has contributed two radio documentaries to Radio 1812, Neighbours, by Abiba Ndeley, and Candidates, by Migration Matters editor Colin Murphy.

Neighbours offers a snapshot of Ndeley’s life growing up in Cameroon, leaving for Ireland, and starting a new life in Dublin. It explores the similarities and differences between her hometown, Limbe, and her adopted home in Dublin. In Dublin, she moved with her husband and four children into the inner-city Pearse Street Flats, and soon found herself a part of a tightly-knit community of neighbours.

Neighbours was made as part of a radio mentoring course, ‘Having your Voice Heard’, run by FOMACS, part-funded by EPIM (European Programme for Integration and Migration) under the ‘Migrants and the Media’ project, and led by broadcaster Roisín Boyd. The course consisted of 12 classes and mentoring, and explored a range of topics, such as the relationship between  ‘voice’ and ‘accent’ – issues of particular interest to migrants who wish to break into the Irish broadcasting sector. Six migrant women, including Ndeley, with experience of or interest in the media, took part.

Candidates has been covered recently on Migration Matters. It is a documentary about immigrant candidates in the 2009 local elections in Ireland, in two formats: a 20-minute version, available here and on Radio 1812, and an eight-minute version, produced with Ronan Kelly for RTE Radio One's The Curious Ear slot.

For a short audio introduction to Radio 1812, there is a compilation of last year's event here.

Radio 1812 is an initiative of the organisation December 18, which is an online resource centre on the human rights of migrant workers.

For more on the background to Radio 1812, see here, and the FAQ, here.

There's a guide to UN sites on migration here.

FOMACS has published a combined DVD and booklet package of the digital stories series, Undocumented in Ireland. The DVD contains the series of stories, and the booklet includes the following:

A summary of the goals of the Bridging Visa Campaign, run by the Migrant Rights Centre of Ireland (MRCI);
An explanation of the collaborative methodology underpinning digital storytelling;
A short updated biography of the storytellers alongside their individual scripts;
A brief description of the weekly workshop written by the facilitator and creative director, Darcy Alexandra;
A synopsis of what happens to migrant workers when they become undocumented;
Excerpts and recommendations from the MRCI publication Life in the Shadows – An Exploration of Irregular Migration in Ireland;
A list of cross-references and links for further exploration.

The digital stories are also available to view here. The package may be purchased here. The previous FOMACS digital stories series, Living in Direct Provision, is here.

These stories were the result of a collaboration between FOMACS and the MRCI. 

The FOMACS series of ultra-short films on asylum and refuge in Ireland, Sanctuary, is screening all this month before features at the Irish Film Institute (IFI) in Dublin. The particular feature films before which it is showing are: First day of rest of your life; Nowhere boy; The Red Shoes; and Humpday. For screening times and details, see here. FOMACS hopes to subsequently distribute Sanctuary to cinemas across Ireland and to produce an accompanying education package for schools.

Sanctuary features some of Ireland's leading actors and writers, as well as some emerging voices, performing a series of short monologues based on the true stories of individuals who have sought asylum in Ireland. It was produced in solidarity with ice&fire theatre company, who originated the concept and play Asylum Monologues.

Promise and Unrest, a documentary feature by Alan Grossman and Áine O’Brien, will premiere at the Jameson Dublin Film Festival in February 2010.

The film tells the story of Noemi Barredo, who was separated from her infant daughter, Gracelle, when she left the Philippines for work in Malaysia, in order to support her parents and extended family. Barredo subsequently arrived in Ireland to work in 2000.

According to the filmmakers, Promise and Unrest is an intimate portrayal of a migrant woman performing caregiving and long-distance motherhood, while assuming the responsibility of sole provider for her family back in the Philippines. Dublin may be a long way from Noemi’s hometown of Babatngon, yet she retains a sharp eye on the welfare of her family, attentive to a range of small businesses she has financed, and paying for the education of her daughter and son, medication for her terminally ill father and her sister’s nursing degree. The film observes the everyday intricacies of Noemi and Gracelle’s relationship, their subsequent reunion in Ireland and the beginnings of a domestic life together in the same country for the first time. Promise and Unrest unravels a familiar yet subtle migration story of maternal sacrifice, loss and love, yet to be seen in Irish cinema. It was filmed over a five-year period.

Alan Grossman is co-director of the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice in DIT.

Áine O'Brien is director of FOMACS and co-director of the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice.

Their most recent documentary feature was Here to Stay, an intimate portrait of Filipino nurse Fidel Taguinod and his political activism in Ireland.

Click here to see a short trailer of the film.

Also in February, FOMACS will launch the teaching pack for the third installment of the animated series Abbi's Circle.

Abbi's Circle is a three-part animation series aimed at 10-13 year olds, telling the story of Abbi, a young Nigerian girl at school in Dublin, and her adventures with family and friends as they negotiate the nuances of being migrants in Ireland. Part one, The Memory Box, told a story of family reunification. Part two, Team Spirit, told a story of asylum. Part three, New Beginnings, tells a story of undocumented migration.

Each episode has been accompanied by a teacher's pack, and the Volume 3 New Beginnings Teaching Pack will be published in February 2010. Written by teachers Liz Morris and Niamh McGuirk, the pack covers issues related to undocumented migration, as well as religious and cultural diversity. As with previous packs, it focuses on the primary school curriculum, offering suggestions for use in SPHE, History, Geography, Visual Arts, Mathematics and more. It employs a combination of in-depth background information sections for teachers, together with a broad range of lesson ideas that are both child-friendly and age-appropriate.

The animation series and teaching packs have been reviewed in the latest (winter) issue of Film Ireland.

The Irish (& Other Foreigners) – From the First People to the Poles is a new account of the history of immigration in Ireland, by Irish Times journalist Shane Hegarty.

According to Liam Harte's review in the Irish Times, Hegarty's 'informative and very accessible popular history of Irish immigration' ranges from pre-historic fossil records through to a dissection of the mythology of the Celts, followed by accounts of the successive arrivals of the Vikings, Anglo-Normans and Protestant New English, culminating in an account of more recent immigration.

'For an avowedly non-academic book, The Irish (and Other Foreigners) distils a great deal of scholarship into its 200-odd pages,' Harte writes. 'Shaming episodes of xenophobia are duly dealt with, from the anti-Semitic boycotts in Limerick in 1904 to then minister for Justice Patrick Cooney’s desire to exclude a tiny cohort of Chileans fleeing Pinochet’s regime 70 years later, on the grounds that their “absorption” could prove “extremely difficult” for Ireland’s monochrome society. Intriguing details punctuate each chapter, such as the fact that the genetic make-up of modern Icelanders is heavily influenced by the Gaels who accompanied the Viking colonisers; that there was one, lone Jew living in Tyrone in 1891; that 10 times as many people moved from America to Ireland in 1932 as went in the other direction; that Polish was the Republic’s unofficial second language in 2006; and that there were 400 “lost” immigrant children in the state in 2008.'

Hegarty made a YouTube trailer for the book, available here. He can be followed on Twitter here.

The reviewer, Liam Harte, is the author of The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001, reviewed here.

The Irish Times also published an excerpt from the book. A short extract follows, on the history of the Italian chipper.

'Irish visitors to Italy will no doubt have noticed that its national dish is not burger and chips. You do not swing onto Rome’s Via del Corso to be met by the smell of boiling oil. You do not sit down for dinner, and choose an antipasto of batter burger and onion rings. Which has always made it somewhat curious that the Italians in Ireland became renowned for their chippers, and that many of the names that were serving fish and chips half a century ago will still be serving snack boxes to peckish or drunken Irish this and every weekend.

'It began sometime in the 1880s, when an Italian, Giuseppe Cervi, stepped off an American-bound boat that had stopped in Cobh and kept walking until he reached Dublin. There, he worked as a labourer until he earned enough money to buy a coal-fired cooker and a hand-cart, from which he sold chips outside pubs.

'Soon after, he found a permanent spot on Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street), where his wife Palma would ask customers ‘Uno di questo, uno di quello?’, meaning ‘one of this and one of the other?’ In doing so, Palma helped to coin a Dublin phrase, ‘one and one’, which is still a common way of asking for fish and chips. The shop, meanwhile, had launched an industry.'

Everyone Has the Right is a call for scripts by London-based theatre company Ice & Fire, a company to the fore of both the 'documentary theatre' movement in the UK, and the treatment of issues of asylum and human rights in drama.

A joint initiative with Amnesty International UK, this is a rolling script submission service for human rights themed plays. Of course, it's not enough to have a well meaning subject. As they say: 'But how can human rights be transformed from formalised, aspirational ideals to real, breathing situations that form the basis for excellent theatre?'

They quote Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize acceptance speech: 'Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.'

The FOMACS short film series, Sanctuary, currently showing at the IFI, has been produced in solidarity with Ice & Fire. Ice & Fire are also the company behind Asylum Monologues. 

The company is currently working on a play about journalists investigating human rights issues. Read their blog here.

Also of interest may be the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) Human Rights Film Award, which was launched last month.

A play based on the verbatim words of asylum seekers had a short run in Dublin recently. Asylum Speakers was scripted by Christine Bacon, writer with Ice & Fire (as above), and produced as part of a mini-festival at the Project Arts Centre, called The Theatre Machine Turns You On. It was reviewed here and here. Ice & Fire are on Twitter.

Media coverage of the impact of the budget on asylum, immigration and integration has been slight, so I will publish some of the reactions here. Firstly, that of the relevant minister, the Minister for Integration, John Curran.

The Office of the Minister for Integration had been threatened in the report of An Bord Snip Nua, headed by economist Colm McCarthy (for more, see here), but has been retained. This was welcomed by the Minister for Integration, John Curran, who said this was a 'recognition of the contribution being made to Irish society by migrants and of the need to continue to promote integration'.

Curran noted that he had assumed responsibility for Integration matters in addition to his other responsibilities, resulting in 'the saving of the normal costs associated with the appointment of a Minister of State, as staff previously employed in the separate Office of the Minister had been allocated to other offices'.

His office received €5.465 million in the budget, compared to a revised estimate of €5.165 million for 2009. The closing of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism had resulted in a saving of about €500,000 euro a year, he said, saying that the functions of the NCCRI had been subsumed into his office.

Some of the key expenditure of that office this year has been:

Local authorities: €950,000

Resettlement: €500,000

National sporting bodies: €470,000

Employment for People from Immigrant Communities project: €390,000

Immigrant Integration Fund administered by Pobal: €280,000

Buried in the small print of the budget was a significant amendment to the Social Welfare Act to exclude all asylum seekers from qualifying for social welfare benefits.

The Free Legal Advice Centres (FLAC) was quick off the mark in spotting this, and denouncing it as 'mean-minded, petty and divisive'.

According to their statement: 'The Government proposal would mean that no-one who had not been given a right to reside in the State could qualify for payments like Child Benefit, State Pensions and Carers Benefit. This would exclude people who had already spent years awaiting an asylum decision.

'There are already provisions under the Habitual Residence Condition to prevent so-called ‘welfare tourism’ and stop people getting benefits unless they have been here for some time and have established links here. (Download FLAC's paper on the habitual residence condition here.)
 
FLAC Senior Solicitor Michael Farrell said the measure would penalise children, persons of pension age and people caring for sick children.

'It will cause divisions in schools where asylum-seekers’ children who may have been here for a number of years will not be able to take part in school trips and will be marked out as different. It will set back efforts at integration.'

FLAC said the Government proposal followed a series of successful appeals taken by FLAC on behalf of asylum-seekers who had all spent years awaiting decisions on their asylum applications. In a total of nine such cases, the Chief Social Welfare Appeals Officer had rejected claims by the Department of Social and Family Affairs that no one in the asylum process could qualify for benefits.

Michael Farrell said the decision showed a cavalier attitude to the system the Government had established to hear social welfare appeals.

'When those tribunals showed genuine independence and made decisions the Government did not like, the Minister’s reaction was to change the law, not to listen to the valid points the Appeals Office was making.'

Watch out for more on this on the blog, Human Rights in Ireland.

FLAC has recently launched an online audio archive, featuring interviews with key people in its 40 year history, and describing the fight for access to justice in Ireland.

Earlier this year, I hit the roads on the campaign trail with some of the 40 immigrants who ran in this year's local elections. The end result of that is a pair of radio documentaries, in eight-minute and twenty-minute versions, called Candidates. The eight-minute version is to be broadcast on RTE Radio One on Saturday at 6.45pm in the Curious Ear slot (and can be heard online on that page) and the 20-minute version will be broadcast on RTE Choice in the near future. Earlier outputs from this project were a feature article and podcast for Le Monde Diplomatique and an article for the Sunday Tribune.

From Patrick Maphoso's activist independent politics on Dublin's northside to Anna Rooney's staunch support for the Government in Clones, this project aimed to chart the diversity of experience and opinion amongst an emerging group of politicians. Ultimately, the experience was a sobering one for many of those. "It will take a long time for people to get used to immigrants participating in the elections," said Maphoso, "but the first generation have to pave the way." In Letterkenny, Michael Abiola Phillips is also philosophical: "I won't be disappointed even if I don't get in this time around," he said. "It means I have to work harder."

This week sees Michael Collins perform two of his plays about Traveller life and culture in Dublin. On Wednesday at 1pm, he performs Mobile, a one-man show about feuding in the Traveller community, at the Axis Ballymun (tel 01 883 2100). From Thursday to Saturday, at 2pm, he performs in his new play, Worlds Apart, Same Difference, at the Project Arts Centre (tel  01 881 9613), alongside Nigerian-Irish actor Tiny James. This play deals with the reaction in the Traveller community when a Traveller woman marries a Nigerian.

I interviewed Collins for the Irish Independent last week: see here. For more on Mobile, see here. These performances are part of Traveller Focus Week 2009. There doesn’t appear to be a website for the week, but there is a small amount of information here, and Pavee Point should be able to provide more.

Tiny James is an actor and comedian. His website is here (it features some of James's stand up routine, which dwells on immigration and multicultural issues).

The Vatican has recently hosted the sixth World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees, which prompts me to look at their online resources on the issue.

Pope Benedict XVI’s address to the congress is here.

‘Why not consider the contemporary phenomenon of migration as a favourable condition for understanding among peoples, for building peace and for a development that concerns every nation?’ he asked. ‘Migration is an opportunity to emphasize the unity of the human family and the values of acceptance, hospitality and love of neighbour.’

Benedict publishes an annual message for World Day of Migrants and Refugees. The archive is here.

Next year’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees, on January 17, is dedicated to the theme of minors. There’s a video report on the Pope’s message (which was published in advance, in October) here and the full text here.

The Vatican has a Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People. Within this there are resources on migrants, refugees, nomadic peoples, and others.

The Vatican website, however, is rather imposing and text-heavy.

The World Congress appears to have received little coverage other than in the Catholic press. A Google News listing is here.

The European lobby group network Migreurop has published an interesting statement on its website, to which I thought it worth drawing attention. They cite statements by Nicolas Sarkozy and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero on the anniversary of the Berlin wall, and draw implications for what they term the 'militarisation' of Europe's borders in the 'war' against migrants, as follows:

Sarkozy: 'La chute du mur de Berlin sonne aujourd’hui comme un appel à combattre les oppressions, à abattre les murs qui, à travers le monde, divisent encore des villes, des territoires, des peuples.' (The fall of the Berlin wall echoes today as a call to fight oppression, to knock down the wall that, across the world, still divide towns, territories and peoples.)

Zapatero: 'No podemos perder de vista que hay otros muros en el mundo que deben caer.' (We can't forget that there are other walls in the world which should fall.)

Migreurop: 'Since it was set up in 2002, the Migreurop network, a collection of more than forty organisations on both sides of the Mediterranean, has been denouncing the imprisonment of migrants, the militarisation of the European Union’s borders and its policies of control and repression of emigration. Understandably, therefore, we wish to see in official declarations calling for walls to be knocked down, like Nicolas Sarkozy’s ’Berlin appeal’, signs of a turning away from what is in effect a war being fought against migrants. For too long, this war has shaped European Union migration policies, and it has caused thousands of victims...' Continued here.

Other resources of interested on Migreurop's site include maps of detention centres and links to other sources. There doesn't appear to be any Irish involvement in the network.

Readers across Ireland may be interested to note today's announcement by the Minister for Integration, John Curran of €499,300 in grants to local authorities to promote integration of immigrants. As this seems unlikely to be covered in detail elsewhere in the Irish media, and as some of this money will presumably find its way to cultural and media projects of interest, through local funding rounds, I thought it worthwhile to publish the figures here, as follows:

Clare County Council: €35,000

Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council 62,500

Galway City Council: 45,000

Kerry County Council:  46,800

Kildare County Council: 40,000

Limerick County Council: 30,000

Mayo County Council: 30,000

Meath County Council: 45,000

South Dublin County Council: 110,000

Wicklow County Council: 15,000
 
According to the Minister, these grants will fund:
- the establishment of forums to enable local authorities to apprise themselves of immigrants' needs on an ongoing basis and to facilitate communication in both directions;

- the payment of small grants to local groups working on integration;

- integration strategy development;

- intercultural centres; and

- intercultural events.

The Minister previously approved a grant to Dublin City Council of €250,000 for integration measures. That was to cover activities including the expansion of the Tell Me More language programme; the Libraries Intercultural Programme; a digital  storytelling and multimedia project; an Ethnic Entrepreneurship Programme; an Anti Racism Discrimination Transport Campaign; a Dublin City Sports Integration initiative; integration dialogue
forums; developing monitoring mechanisms and indicators on integration at city level; and grants to local groups carrying out integration measures.

Some further details on that, including how to apply for grants, are here. I have sought further details from the Council but they have not been forthcoming.

'Sanctuary' is a series of short films comprising the stories of people seeking asylum in Ireland, produced by FOMACS and screening before main features at the Irish Film Institute throughout December. There's a preview here.

The 26 ultra-short monologues, all less than one minute long, are based on the true stories of individuals, and are performed by actors and writers.

Amongst the stories are George Seremba's account of escaping death in Milton Obote's Uganda, told by the actor himself, and stories of children being sent into exile alone, of people stuck in legal limbo in the asylum system, and of people triumphing over huge odds to make new lives in Ireland.

Sanctuary will travel to cinemas across Ireland in 2010, and has been produced in solidarity with Ice and Fire Theatre Company, UK

FOMACS has just released a DVD and booklet package, 'Undocumented in Ireland: Our Stories'. It comprises documentation and commentary on the stories produced in the ‘Undocumented in Ireland: Our Stories’ Workshop, which was the result of a collaboration between FOMACS and the Migrant Rights Centre of Ireland (MRCI). There is more on the digital stories themselves here.

In addition to the digital stories on the DVD the booklet includes:
•    A summary of the goals of the MRCI ‘Bridging Visa Campaign’ Group
•    An explanation of the collaborative methodology underpinning digital storytelling
•    A short updated biography of the storytellers alongside their individual scripts
•    A brief description of the weekly workshop written by the facilitator and creative director, Darcy Alexandra
•    A synopsis of what happens to migrant workers when they become undocumented
•    Excerpts and recommendations from the MRCI publication ‘Life in the Shadows – An Exploration of Irregular Migration in Ireland’
•    A list of cross-references and links for further exploration.
 

Dublin City University has recently partnered with a Dublin-based company, Channel Content, to produce a video-based training programme on 'Managing Workplace Diversity'.

The programme was launched last week by the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Seán Haughey who described it as an example of successful collaboration between universities and the business community, based on research in intercultural training was created through DCU’s leadership of a collaborative pan-European project entitled the European Intercultural Workplace (EIW). The programme addresses core diversity issues including food, religion, gender, body language and racism.

Channel Content describes itself as 'a learning and communications company that creates digital and social media to boost user access and engagement.' The company has a YouTube channel here.
 

RTE Prime Time last week reported on the issue of separated children seeking asylum, reporting that 396 children were currently missing from state care. The report was prompted by the release of a publication by the Children's Ombudsman on the issue, which focussed on the poor quality of the hostels where children are accommodated. That report, as well as a document comprising statements by separated children, are available here. There's a useful summary here. In an editorial, the Irish Times called the neglect of these children 'a festering administrative sore'. The Times's news report is here. This is an issue that has long been flagged by the Dun Laoghaire Refugee Project, a group which arose some years ago primarily in response to the large number of separated children then being accommodated in hostels in Dun Laoghaire. The photo here, by Derek Spiers, is from an early campaign the group ran, called 'Please Let Us Stay', seeking permission to remain in Ireland for former separated children who had 'aged out', or passed the age of 18.

I've had occasion to write about Western Sahara a number of times on Migration Matters. This week, there have been developments on two fronts worth flagging here. The leading Western Saharan human rights activist Aminatou Haidar is entering the second week of a hunger strike in Lanzarote airport, having been expelled by Morocco following a bizarre incident where she apparently refused to write her nationality as Moroccan on the landing card at the airport (as she arrived home from receiving the Civil Courage Prize in the US), and was accused by Morocco of renouncing her citizenship. The only regular updates on this situation appear to be in the Spanish press, such as El Pais, which has reported that the Moroccan authorities, contrary to their statements, had planned Haidar's expulsion in advance. I've written about this at more length here, and wrote previously about Haidar here. See also the photos here. For the Moroccan take on this situation, which also provides an update on US policy, see this article by a former US ambassador, now an advisor to the Moroccan government.

More positive news comes from Aziza Brahim, a Western Saharan singer from the refugee camps in Algeria, on the other side of the berm that divides Western Sahara, featured here on a number of previous occasions. This week, she was nominated for (but didn't win) the Freedom to Create Prize, in London. The prize was won by the Iranian filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who was interviewed by the Guardian here. The Sunday Times had a good overview of this year's nominees here.

From the Facebook page of Joe Higgins, I picked up this eye-witness account of the 254 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees currently moored in Indonesia, following a failed attempt to get to Australia to seek asylum. The report includes a letter from an eight year old, Brintha, which I have reprinted here.

'We are Sri Lankans, there were, kidnap, kill, gun shots and bombing. Because of that reason we lost our half family and we were Sri Lankan refugees and also we lost our properties and gutere. At that time we heard that Australia takes refugees in the country. So we got ready to go to Australia. We came to Malaysia. After two months we went to the forests. We got a hard life. For example: we got wet in the rain and drank muddy water. And also we live in middle of insects. And later we started our journey on the wooden boat. One day suddenly the engine stopped and the weather condition was bad. It shook a lot. And the engine was okay. While we were traveling to the Indonesian border we were arrested by the Indonesian Navy. We came to Indonesian habour of ‘Merak’. And we are waiting in the boat for one month asking Indonesian government to give us a solution. But still we didn’t get an answer. While we were arrested by the navy we asked the Australian Embazy so that lady said “you can go to the land” but we didn’t get down if we have done it we would have been in the ‘detention centre’ She was a big liyer... We had a hard life every where please gives us a solution.'

Two Seas TV is a South African tv production company which has recently set up an online social network for tv professionals working in South Africa or on Africa-related issues. They used SocialGO to set up the network - SocialGO allows you to set up a social network for free, quickly. Two Seas TV's own website is here.

Through Two Seas, I came across Nomadsland, an online forum for video on social issues. As they explain:

'What is NomadsLand? It’s a new destination built by nomads - professionals who have spent much of their lives traversing the globe – gathering, recording and sharing in our collective human experience. We are video producers, filmmakers, activists, nonprofit staffers and social entrepreneurs who are joining forces to curate, create and distribute visual media that raises awareness and support of worthwhile international projects and important global issues. As our logo indicates, we are squarely focused on media that addresses issues affecting the "base of the pyramid."

'We believe that online video – or what we refer to as "micro-documentaries" – is how socially responsible organizations and companies will tell their story in the age of Web 3.0. A "micro-documentary" captures the essence of a project and the characters that propel it in a way that a blog or a Tweet simply cannot.

'At NomadsLand, we aim to boost the signal and reduce the noise of video found on the Internet. On these pages, we are curating the best social issue video available on the web while creating a community for filmmakers and organizations to partner on original productions.'

There's a section of videos on migration, and you can subscribe to email updates.

Anybody interested in the potential of online video for campaigning and advocacy should look at these videos on health reform in the US. They're the finalists in a competition run by the Obama campaign spin-off organisation, Organizing for America, to solicit videos made by supporters.

Closer to home, the EU Commission recently sponsored a competition as part of the Darklight digital film festival in Dublin for one-minute videos on the theme of 'Democracy and Dialogue'. The winner was this beautifully produced short, 'Noise to Get Heard', by Alan Early, on the subject of gay marriage. 

Taking their title from an iconic 1968 rock sampler, 'The Theatre Machine Turns You On' is a weeklong sampler of theatrical experimentation from the next generation of theatre makers in Dublin, at the Project Arts Centre from December 1 to 5. Each night sees separate shows at 6.30, 7.30 and 8.30 pm. Amongst them is ‘Asylum Speakers’, a piece of documentary theatre in which four performers tell the real stories of people seeking asylum in Dublin, developed in association with one of the UK’s leading documentary theatre companies, iceandfire, by director Tara Robinson and writer Christine Bacon. Iceandfire and Actors for Human Rights have developed a series of documentary plays, including 'Asylum Monologues' and 'The Illegals', which tour the UK to raise awareness.

Also on during the festival is a play called ‘The Cappuccino Culture’, a multilingual piece of documentary theatre exploring Dublin’s cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. The festival is presented by THEATREclub, an emerging theatre company in Dublin, and an intriguing initiative called Exchange Dublin, a new artists' collective based on Exchange Street in Dublin's Temple Bar. What's intriguing about Exchange is that it's led by a group of teenagers and early twentysomethings, and was founded by Dylan Haskins, who's been organising arts and cultural events in Dublin since he was 16 or so. Read the interview with him by Jim Carroll of the Irish Times (on Carroll's blog) from earlier this year to get a glimpse of what's happening in the worlds of youth and 'DIY' culture in Dublin.

Publishing Perspectives (featured here recently) brings news from London of the 25th anniversary celebrations of Wasafiri, a magazine showcasing the best in international contemporary writing. They report:

'Wasafiri is a Kiswahili word and translates as “travelers.” Susheila Nasta [the editor] says the name was chosen “because many of those who created the literatures in which Wasafiri was interested have all been cultural travelers, either through migration, transportation or else in the more metaphorical sense of seeking an imagined cultural ‘home.’”

'The magazine’s journey reads like a short story you might find on one of its pages. In its early days, it was edited in various living rooms in London and Kent, while back issues were stored in an Islington pub... Today, Wasafiri is regarded as Britain’s premier magazine for international contemporary writing, and it continues to expand and break new ground within the international literary and publishing landscape.'

Wasafiri's home page describes itself as having 'continued to provide consistent coverage to Britain's diverse cultural heritage and publish a range of diasporic and migrant writing worldwide.' Wasafiri has 'consistently aimed to shift the contours of established literary canons and extend the borders of international contemporary writing, creating imaginative spaces and publishing some of the most promising new literary voices.'

Nasta tells the story of the magazine's birth and role here. She says: 'The best literary works – whatever the particular trajectories of the often mixed cultural traditions which inform them – are challenging precisely because they take us to the limits of what can be expressed, in forms which extend understanding and carry us to new vistas where hope and desire would like to reside. If we lose the ability to continue to cross frontiers, confront change, write the stories of the future, we may not only lose our way but also our humanity.'

The magazine has made a selection of the best writing over its 25 years available in a free download. Wasafiri is also on Facebook.

The latest Migration Information Source newsletter from Kirin Kalia at the Migration Policy Institute has a useful overview of coverage of the situation of asylum seekers in Australia. I have reprinted it here:

Boatloads of asylum seekers headed for Australia made headlines nearly a decade ago. The response of the government then was to process them on island territories or persuade Pacific Island countries like Nauru to accept them while their claims were being processed (see the Australia country profile).

A new wave of asylum seekers in the past year, most of them from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, has set off a new public outcry. The issue recently reached a boiling point when the Oceanic Viking, an Australian customs ship that had rescued 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers in international waters, attempted to bring them to Indonesia for processing in mid-October.

In a standoff that lasted nearly a month, the Sri Lankans refused to come ashore in Indonesia, saying they wanted to be taken to Australia. Last Friday, 22 of the Sri Lankans agreed to enter an Australian-funded processing center in Indonesia after the Australian government essentially promised them their claims would be fast tracked. They could be resettled to Australia, but the government has made no guarantees (see the ABC News story)

Australia's opposition leader has attacked the government's offer, saying it will only encourage more human smugglers. The Australian government's attempts to reach a broader agreement with Indonesia on human smuggling had another setback Monday when Indonesia's president postponed his visit to Australia. In addition, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd admitted his staff were involved in the asylum-seeker deal, but he maintained he had no prior knowledge of it (see The Age).

According to provisional statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of asylum seekers in Australia increased 27 percent in the first half of 2009 (2,501 claims) compared to the same period in 2008. The 2009 level remains well below those Australia experienced in 2000 and 2001.

For more on how Australia and others, including the United States and the European Union, approach migrants who arrive by sea, see MPI's report The New Boat People.

The MPI's website is here and is on Facebook here.

This week we launch a redesigned Migration Matters newsletter, and are sending it out to our entire database. If you have received the newsletter and wish to remain subscribed, there's no need to do anything. If you wish to subscribe, go here. If you wish to unsubscribe, please follow the link at the top of the newsletter.

Migration Matters is an online report on how the media covers and documents migration issues. The newsletter contains a précis of the week's reports, and is published each Friday.

Migration Matters is a project of FOMACS, the Forum on Migration and Communications. It is edited by Colin Murphy.

If you know of any media that we should be reporting, but haven't, do let us know. Contact us with your thoughts or suggestions at migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org.

The latest report from Fortress Europe records 33 border deaths in September: 25 of whom died in a shipwreck that occurred in the high sea off the Moroccan coast on the route towards Spain, on 19 September, with eight others killed by the shots fired by Egyptian police at the border with Israel, they report.

'Some days after the Perejil shipwreck, a little more information surfaced. There were 19 men and 17 women from west Africa on board, with four babies born during the journey, in Morocco, whose age was between one and three years. Out of 17 women, at least eight were pregnant. 16 were Nigerian, aged between 15 and 25. One of the young women was a 22-year-old Guinean (Guinea Bissau). The majority of the men were Nigerian, except for two Senegalese and a Guinean (Guinea Bissau). The dinghy was heading towards Cádiz. At three in the morning, the first call for help went out. Someone living in Spain received the call and warned the emergency service. When the rescue services arrived it was too late; the dinghy had capsized at sea. Eight corpses were recovered (a 25-year-old Nigerian man and seven young women, Nigerian as well, aged between 16 and 24, four of whom were pregnant). There were 11 survivors: seven young Nigerian men and four Nigerian women. Those missing at sea were 17. The survivors were taken back to Morocco, to Tangiers harbour, from where they were expelled the following day and accompanied back to the Algerian border, to Oujda, from where it was assumed that they had entered Morocco.'

I reported from Oujda on a similar story last year, and later, in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, on the north Moroccan coast, heard more accounts of the long and dangerous journeys made to get into Europe.

Also on the Fortress Europe website, which now houses a substantial multimedia archive:

The Northern Jungle. Reportage from Calais and London. A documentary by Vincent Nguyen and Jean-Sebastien Desbordes (in French), with the voices of Eritrean refugees, trucks drivers, smugglers and social workers met along the route.

A review of border deaths in the first six months of 2009

Sent back to Libya: Exclusive Photos from Paris Match of the return of 90 people, shipwrecked while crossing the Mediterranean, to Tripoli by the Italian coastguard patrol boat that rescued them.

Currently touring the highlands and islands of Scotland is the Africa in Motion film festival. The festival runs each year in Edinburgh in late October, and this year has followed that with four 'mini-festivals' in New Galloway, Isle of Skye, Drumnadrochit and Lerwick. The rural tour programme is here.

'By working alongside established rural film venues,' they say, 'we hope to establish a broader platform to expose issues as well as challenge conceptions of the African continent and African cinema.'

The programme for the full festival, which is the biggest African film festival in the UK, is here.

Of particular interest is the film 'Come un uomo sulla terra' (Like a man on earth). According to the blurb: 'In 2005, a law student from Addis Ababa fled Ethiopia to escape violent political repression, setting off for Libya across the desert border. Once in Libya, he attempted to make his way to the Mediterranean, only to be caught by one of the numerous criminal gangs that control the route. After many ordeals he was betrayed by the gang to the Libyan police, and deported back to Ethiopia. Having eventually escaped to a refugee camp in Rome, this film is his attempt to bring together his own story with those of the many other refugees who have suffered in their attempts to escape brutality at home, stories of great suffering and great dignity. 'Come un uomo sulla terra' is a journey of pain and dignity, through which Dagmawi Yimer voices his memories of unthinkable human suffering to denounce a tragic political and humanitarian situation.

More on the film, including a clip, on its website, here.

Professor Alessandro Triulzi from the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’, who worked as a producer and researcher on the film, gave a seminar on the research context of the film at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

The festival's Facebook page has more information on individual films and activities.

Photoinsight is a website showcasing and archiving multimedia responses to 'forced migration'. Run by John Nassari, an artist and academic at the University of East London, it's well worth a look. The design of the site appears curiously static in the Web 2.0 era, but it proves to be an understated but effective curatorial form: see Nassari's photographic and audio exhibition on the Greek Cypriot community in London here and one exhibit from that here. Amongst the many other works on the site is Perry Ogden's 'Pony Kids', documenting traveller children and their horses at the horse fair in Dublin. Ogden went on to make the drama-documentary style film 'Pavee Lackeen' about a young Traveller girl in Dublin. There is also a collection of essays and an introduction to postcolonial theory, amongst other resources. The website's main aim, they say, 'is to create a resource of visual and written work which addresses ethnicity, identity and cultural difference. Its purpose is to share multi-disciplinary research in the field of refugee studies. To create a resource of art and theory which explores issues of exile, memory, home and identity in the context of forced migration.' More on John Nassari on Pilot, a curatorial archive, here. 

Thinking laterally, this might be of interest to Migration Matters readers: a lecture on issues of heritage and the dispersal of cultural artifacts by the director of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis. The lecture is titled ‘Collections present and absent at the new Acropolis Museum?’ and is on next Wednesday in Dublin at 6.30pm in the Ceramics Room, National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street. This is the annual Irish Museums Association James White Lecture. (Admission is free, but booking essential.)

Dimitrios Pandermalis has been Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki since 1979 and is internationally known for his lectures on classical archaeology. From 1996 to 2000 he was a national member of the Greek parliament.

The new Museum of the Acropolis, designed by Bernard Tschumi, the renowned Swiss architect opened in June this year, and is located 300 yards south of the Acropolis hill, where the 134-year-old original museum still stands. The new glass-marble structure faces the Acropolis, providing a view of the Parthenon Temple and other key structures. The museum is mounted on roller bearings so the structure and contents will be protected from earthquake tremors. The project was a multicultural enterprise drawing on glass crews from Germany and the UK and concrete workers from Albania, India, Russia and Greece. The new museum echoes the ascent to the Acropolis with the top floor displaying the friezes of the Parthenon. Copies have been put in place of the parts of the friezes that are housed at the British Museum, the original artworks having been taken to London in 1801, by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin.

There's an interview with Pandermalis, along with extensive other information on Elgin, on the site Elginism, and video of a talk by Pandermalis on Fora.tv, 'the web's largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates going on all the time at the world's top universities, think tanks and conferences'.

Booking contact details: (01) 4120939; office@irishmuseums.org; www.irishmuseums.org.

Watch this. It's a short video animation titled 'Boot racism out of football', made by Bruntsfield primary school in England and hosted on the Irish Show Racism the Red Card campaign site. Gorgeous, witty, very smart.

Show Racism the Red Card is a campaign seeking to harness the profile of sport to educate against racism, and supporting programmes encouraging integration through and within sport. One current initiative is the Online Anti-racism Creative Competition, which seeks to engage schools and youth services through producing multi-media artwork and entering it online. There is an education pack with DVD, clips from which are also available online, and young people are asked to produce a piece of art - whether a painting, photo or written article - on the themes of the DVD. There is another short video here, an example of a video entry to the competition. There's also a downloads section on the site, and a Facebook page. More on this subject to follow.

Show Racism the Red Card leads me to the anti-racism resource on teachers.tv, a British site. Teachers.tv is an online video resource and has an extensive selection of videos on themes of racism, integration, asylum, etc. There is an interview with the Watford player Al Bangura, about his childhood and how his life has changed since arriving in Britain as an asylum seeker, here. (Alas, these videos are not available to view outside the UK though there is a brief text summary of the interview.) The British Show Racism the Red Card campaign is here. The campaign has a number of films available. There's a trailer for their film on Islamophobia here. Teachers TV programmes are also available on Sky 880, Virgin Media 240, Freesat 650 and Freeview 88 (4-6pm) and through iTunes U.

As I write, on Friday afternoon, Joe Duffy's 'Liveline' programme on RTE Radio One is discussing the theatre show 'Adolf' which opened last night in Dublin. The play is a one-man show based on Adolf Hitler by Pip Utton in which Utton plays Hitler, in the first half, and then plays a contemporary racist character in the second, making racist jokes, etc, with apparently the intent of provoking the audience to reflect on the enduring risk of fascism and racism.

The theatre director Peter Sheridan was in the audience and, shortly before the end, interrupted the performance to shout out 'Tolerance, tolerance' and left. There were other walkouts. Sheridan and another woman talked to Duffy on air, and argued that the play apparently had the effect of simply repeating (and thereby endorsing) the sentiments of the characters, rather than satirising them. 'When you're dealing with material this provocative and this incendiary you'd better be absolutely sure that you've got the balance right, and this show hasn't got the balance right,' said Sheridan. Utton came on air to defend the show.

Utton has been touring the show for over a decade, including playing three times in Berlin, and has received strong reviews, including in Edinburgh. Utton was interviewed at some length on Newstalk's 'Culture Shock' programme last night (which doesn't appear to be available to listen back), and came across as a sensitive and thoughtful writer-performer. There's a video clip of the play, which I haven't yet seen, here.

I've recently come across a new online/email magazine in the US, which I thought worth mentioning here. 'Publishing Perspectives' purports to be something of an online trade paper for the publishing industry, but in fact is a much broader-themed resource, dealing with questions of media and literature more generally. The magazine publishes one lead story daily, online and via email, with 'bonus material' and 'global updates' alongside. It's published by Edward Nawotka, who did doctoral work at UCD in Ireland in the 1990s (where we knew each other) and is now based in Houston, Texas. It strikes me as a particularly clean and effective example of online publishing, combining print and low-fi video in an accessible but uncluttered format. Material of particular interest to readers includes:

An interview with Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on 'straddling continents'.

An interview with Anita Diaman, author of 'Day After Night' which tells the fictional story of a group of young women who escaped Nazi Europe for Palestine, only to be detained in a British run camp for illegal immigrants.

A report on Mike Kim's book 'Escaping North Korea', the story of Kim's efforts to help North Korean refugees cross the border into China. Kim was also interviewed on BBC World Service's 'Outlook' programme. See also Kim's own site.

The civil liberties monitoring organisation Statewatch has highlighted a number of reports of interest to Migration Matters in recent bulletins. These are:

1. A FRONTEX (EU borders agency) report on 'The impact of the global economic crisis on illegal migration to the EU'. The report seeks to draw conclusions based on the decrease in the numbers of undocumented migrants reaching the EU (or attempting to do so) and the economic crisis in the EU leading to fewer job opportunities.

2. 'Spooked! How not to prevent violent extremism' by the Institute of Race Relations in the UK. An excellent report and critique of the counter-terrorism Prevent programme from the IRR, according to Statewatch. To quote: 'There is strong evidence that a significant part of the Prevent programme involves the embedding of counter-terrorism police officers within the delivery of local services, the purpose of which seems to be to gather intelligence on Muslim communities, to identify areas, groups and individuals that are ‘at risk’ and to then facilitate interventions, such as the Channel programme, as well as more general police engagement with the Muslim community, to manage perceptions of grievances.'

"The atmosphere promoted by Prevent is one in which to make radical criticisms of the government is to risk losing funding and facing isolation as an ‘extremist’, while those organisations which support the government are rewarded. This in turn undermines the kind of radical discussions of political issues that would need to occur if young people are to be won over and support for illegitimate political violence diminished. The current emphasis of Prevent on depoliticising young people and restricting radical dissent is actually counter-productive because it strengthens the hands of those who say democracy is pointless.'

3. An online news report on Der Spiegel on the acquittal of the Cap Anamur crew in Italy. On 7 October 2009, a Sicilian court acquitted the former chair of the human rights organisation Cap Anamur, Elias Bierdel, his former captain, Stefan Schmidt, and the first officer of the ship, Wladimir Dschkewitsch. In 2004, the three had rescued 37 refugees off the Italian coast from distress at sea and helped them to land in Sicily. They were then accused of and prosecuted for assisting in illegal entry. They faced the possibility of four years imprisonment and a fine of 400.000 EUR. The organisation Cap Anamur and the German asylum rights organisation Pro Asyl had started an international campaign for justice to acquit the three and have reacted positively to the decision.

4.'The Privatization of Immigration Detention: Towards a Global View', a working paper by the Global Detention Project, a Geneva based institution that seeks to map the use of detention as a response to immigration. Readers may also have missed this quote from Silvio Berlusconi, featured on the homepage of the Global Detention Project: 'I think it is much easier to examine individual situations in the country of origin, otherwise they [irregular immigrants] come here and go to a camp which, I should not be saying this, is very similar to a concentration camp.'

This just in from ArtPolonia: If you missed the performance in September of the experimental theatre performance, based on the post-Kantor Minimal Art theatrical method, 'The Boot's On the Other Foot', you can see it tonight, Friday 30 October at 7pm in the Tivoli Theatre. It's part of 'The Destructors Manifesto' Festival, billed as 'a night with a twist, from great bands, fantastic art exhibitions, short film tents and much more'.

Also upcoming from ArtPolonia: Lutosphere experimental music concert, November 30, Liberty Hall Theatre. Poland’s most celebrated musicians present their daring and innovative interpretation of works by Witold Lutosławski, Poland’s most renowned composer of the 20th century.

An 'x-ART market' will take place in the Centre for Creative Practices from December 4 to 20, with arts, crafts, music and performance. Artists interested in presenting their works for sale at the market should email info@artpolonia.org by November 22.

With all the talk here of the recent Dublin theatre festival and fringe, I ommitted to mention the show that most affected me, because in the throes of the festival I missed its relevance to Migration Matters. 'Silver Stars', a song cycle about the lives of older, gay, Irish men, was most obviously about being gay - but it was also, critically, about the experience of emigration, for many of the stories told were of men who had been forced to leave Ireland. Based on interviews by the musician Sean Miller, the show was put together by the innovative young theatre company Brokentalkers. (Miller plays a one-off concert in Dublin at the Project tonight, which will feature some of the (gorgeous) songs from 'Silver Stars'.)

I wrote about the show in the Irish Independent; it was also reviewed in the Irish Times. Brokentalkers' Facebook page is here. 'Silver Stars' has been invited to play at the Under the Radar festival in New York in January. I have little doubt that, once the American press gets word of it, it will become a sensation. In fact, the show is absolutely un-sensationalist; but the combination of its narratives of emigration to the US and self-empowerment with its sexual politics, Irish origins and sensitive deployment of cutting edge theatrical practice seems to me likely to be very well received in New York.

'Migrations, Exile' is the theme of a talk next Friday (November 6) as part of the Cervantes Institute Festival of Literature. The discussion will feature the authors Antón Castro, Marifé Santiago Bolaños, Marina Oroza, José FA Oliver and Gerald Dawe and will be moderated by Catherine O’Leary.

The festival is titled 'Rucksacks and Suitcases: Mutant Geographies' and the various events tackle the themes of travelling, exile, migration, tourism, pleasure traveling, journeys, and travels to the past and to the future, with writers from Cuba, Chile, Ireland, Argentina, Germany and Spain. Click here to download the programme. The festival runs from Thursday 5th to Saturday 7th. Other events are:

Thursday, 6.30 pm: Rucksacks and suitcases: opening talk

Friday, 10.30 am: A suitcase for an island: talk

Friday, 2.30 pm: Screening of the documentary, 'Even the Olives Are Bleeding' about the Irish in the Spanish Civil War

Saturday, 12 pm: Return and writing: literary brunch.

The Cervantes Institute is a Spanish government-funded institute to promote and spread the Spanish language and Spanish and Hispanic-American culture. Its head office is located in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, author of 'Don Quixote'.

Following last week's special report from the Western Sahara refugee camps, my article for Le Monde Diplomatique on Aziza Brahim and her music will be online here in the next couple of days. In the meantime, here are some further thoughts on Western Sahara, migration and the media...

‘Africa’s last colony’ was how one of the authorities on the Western Sahara in English, Toby Shelley, described the country, in his sharp and accessible book, 'Endgame in the Western Sahara'.

Having reported from the colony/country/disputed territory last year (in an article and a radio report), I had the opportunity to visit the territory of the Western Saharan government-in-exile, the Polisario Front earlier this month. Their ‘territory’ encompasses a series of refugee camps in Algeria, in the desert near the Algerian city of Tindouf.

‘Desert’ is in no way a euphemism: is unremittingly hot and utterly barren, compelling and very beautiful in its way, but land that feels viscerally hostile to human beings. Yet the Sahrawi people have lived there – not through choice – for 34 years and counting, and have built a functioning (though perhaps barely) polity there.

One of the ways they have managed to do so, it seemed to me, has been through using migration as a strategy for development and empowerment. The Sahrawis are a nomadic people by origin and nomadism is still practiced to some extent form the camps, with people leaving the camps for periods in the ‘free zone’ that is the area of Western Sahara occupied by the Polisario (east of the berm built by Morocco securing their occupation of the core territory). In the years since their exile, however, it might be fair to speak of a globalised nomadism.

The Sahrawis are a highly travelled people. Young people go abroad for secondary education, and often for third: Cuba and Algeria appear to be the leading destinations. During the week I was there, a van drove through the camps at night broadcasting public announcements via a loudspeaker: “Children going to study in Libya are to be assemble with their bags in the morning.”

Some Sahrawis travel to Mauritania, and from there can travel into the ‘occupied territory’ of Western Sahara – though this is officially disallowed by the Polisario. Others, like the singer Aziza Brahim, obtain Algerian passports (with the backing of the Polisario) and can travel internationally. There are large numbers of Sahrawis living in Spain, where many have obtained residency and citizenship through former colonial ties.

According to some sources, those who have gone to Cuba for their education - such as Aziza Brahim - have often found it difficult to reintegrate into life in the camps upon their return. Students who study closer to home maintain closer contact and have better access to the few formal opportunities in the camps, in administration and basic services. Those who go to Cuba often spend five years and more away from home without visiting, and typically form very tight bonds amongst themselves. In the past, some of these have subsequently not resettled into life in the camps, and have sought opportunities abroad. One group of young intellectual emigrés formed a group called the Generación de la Amistad Saharaui to promote their culture internationally (modelled on the pre-civil war Spanish Generación de la Amistad); more recently, some of these have been 'reincorporated' into the official Polisario international network and appointed as cultural ambassadors. They keep a blog here.

With regard to media, the camps are poorly served. There was no evident newspaper or magazine circulation; there is a Polisario radio station and a recently inaugurated and extremely basic tv station - the station is, however, a smart user of limited resources; we met one correspondent at the airport, who travelled on his own, filming his own reports and filing them each evening over the internet. Internet access was very sparse, though the proliferation of mobile phones suggests that, once data packages become more accessible, internet access will quickly become widespread, which is likely to provoke innovative usage of already existing online media and have interesting cultural effects. 

Internationally, Spain is the sole western country that pays extensive attention to Western Sahara. An online campaign, Todos Por El Sahara, has been supported by the actor Javier Bardem and singer Manu Chao have recently supported a campaign, Todos Con El Sahara. An indicator of the relative indifference to or ignorance of the story is the fact that the New York Times online lists just ten articles in ten years on the story. The most recent, last year, focussed on the controversial issue of criticism of the Polisario regime by former refugees in Algeria who fled to Western Sahara.

October 16 marked the anniversary of the International Court of Justice ruling in 1975 that Western Sahara had the right to self determination, as was noted in a letter to the Guardian. Less politically, this travel blog post on the Guardian leads me to Listen to Africa, the online record of a two year journey across Africa by bicycle, recording African sounds and voices, which crossed through Western Sahara earlier this year. Enjoy.

I've just returned from a week in the Sahara, in the Polisario Front refugee camps in Algeria. The week was spent working on a documentary, which has just finished production, about the Western Saharan exile singer, Aziza Brahim.

Earlier this year, director Donal Scannell and I joined Brahim and her Spanish group, Gulili Mankoo, on tour in Spain (during which we stopped off at the Roman ruins in Merida and captured this spontaneous performance - also posted below); more recently, we were in London for the African Music Festival (for which the Independent interviewed Brahim). Last week, we travelled with her to visit her family in the refugee camps, on her first visit home in three years.

Brahim’s mother was pregnant when she fled Laayoune in Western Sahara, with her family, in 1975, following the Moroccan invasion. (The BBC's overview of this conflict is here.) She was born in the refugee camps, and grew up there, before being sent to Cuba for secondary school, along with many of her peers. She refused the option of pursuing third level in Cuba, and returned home to the camps, where she started to perform, taking first prize in an annual singing competition. She moved to Spain to pursue a singing career; there was an early hiatus, during which she quit, but when she started singing again more recently, she quickly found a measure of recognition and success both in Spain and on the world music circuit.

Her digital release ‘Mi Canto’ topped the world music chart on emusic.com and she has rapidly acquired status as a cultural representative of the Saharawi people, alongside the renowned singer Mariem Hassan.

Scannell recorded Brahim’s September concert in London, and on Thursday last, it was given a public screening in one of the refugee camps, in a community hall. Though this screening was a largely spontaneous outcome of the ongoing process of making the documentary, it seemed to be one of some significance. Till now, Brahim had not had the opportunity to raise her profile, or to play her music, in the refugee camps. (Travel to the camps is complicated by cost – there are no direct flights – and by visa issues.) The public screening, which was coordinated by the Polisario Ministry of Culture, gave her the opportunity to firmly introduce her music to Polisario’s senior members and the Ministry of Culture itself, and to the Saharawi public.

The screening was publicised the previous night in the typical form in the camps – a loudspeaker announcement from a Ministry van. The screening took place in the morning, and the audience was almost entirely women. Those we spoke to spoke of being very proud of their compatriot, and of being excited to see Saharawi music being blended with foreign, modern influences, such as rock and blues. The official response was very enthusiastic, and they hope to replicate the screening in the many community halls throughout the camps, and hoped to broadcast it on Polisario radio and on the recently started tv station.

There is a skeleton market economy in the camps, which has arisen only in recent years, and there is no electricity supply: people use solar panels to charge car batteries, which they use to power lights and basic appliances such as a music player. Thus there is no formal market for distribution of music. What has arisen instead, though, is a bootleg, digital market: digital music is downloaded onto mobile phones, often from privately-run kiosks which also offer phone services, and people then pass these files from mobile to mobile via bluetooth.

Accordingly, Scannell made a low-res version of the Merida music video of Brahim and gave it to Brahim’s younger family members; as we left the camps, this was already seemingly hopping from phone to phone, and seemed to have the potential for going ‘viral’, providing perhaps as much potential exposure as the more formal distribution and publicity of screenings and broadcasts.

There is an annual film festival in the camps, and Scannell was encouraged to present his film on Brahim for inclusion next year. In the meantime, Brahim has been nominated for an international human rights prize. More on these to follow.

A number of Brahim’s songs are versions of poems in Hassania, her native language (a dialect of Arabic) by her grandmother, an acclaimed Saharawi poet, Ljadra Mint Mabruk. There is an article on her (in Spanish) here and a video of her reciting here. Brahim’s myspace page is here.

Scannell received Irish Aid ‘seed funding’ (via the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund) to develop the documentary. (The seed funding strand is unusual – and very useful – in tv production funding, as it provides small amounts up front to allow a producer get started on a project, with almost no strings attached.)

Incidentally, Scannell came to Brahim’s music through that of the Touareg group Tinariwen, leading figures in 'desert blues'.

This time next week I'll file a further report on the interplay between migration and media issues in the Saharawi camps. Normal Migration Matters service - regular, shorter reports, will resume thereafter. As always, new readers can sign up for the email newsletter version here.

Colin Murphy

'Ideas worth spreading' is the catchy tagline of TED, an online collection of videos of talks by inspirational public intellectuals. TED is more than that - it started life in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from the worlds of technology, entertainment and design (hence the acronym), but it is its more recent emergence as a prominent online video platform that is of more interest here. 

As they put it, they make 'riveting talks by remarkable people free to the world'. Currently on the home page is a talk by a remarkable writer, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie. Adichie draws on her own experience as part of the diaspora to speak of the hegemony of the Western worldview, the need to tell diverse stories and 'the danger of a single story'. Her talk is here.

TED held a conference in 2007 on the theme of 'Africa: The Next Chapter'. Those talks are here.

Of general interest, the site has a selection of short videos, 'Ted in three minutes', here and the top ten talks are here.

A belated note on a play in the recent Absolut Fringe festival in Dublin with the intriguing title of 'Jesus Has My Mom in There and Has Beat Her Up Real Bad'. This was a new play by Dee Roycroft produced by the well established Dublin company, Loose Canon. Roycroft's play was unconventional in style, merging diverse narratives and staged in a deliberately untheatrical way (now commonly referred to as 'post-dramatic' theatre). One of the narratives threaded through it was the story of two teenagers from Guinea, Yaguine Koïta and Fodé Tounkara, who stowed away on a flight to Brussels in 1999, and froze to death. They carried a letter with them to be read in case they 'sacrificed' themselves and were killed en route. This letter was widely published internationally. Addressed to 'Excellencies, Messrs. members and officials of Europe', it concluded, 'if you see that we have sacrificed ourselves and risked our lives, this is because we suffer too in Africa and that we need you to fight against poverty and to put an end to the war in Africa. Nevertheless, we want to learn, and we ask you to help us in Africa learn to be like you'. Roycroft's play succeeded in presenting their story in an unsentimental but arresting fashion, in an engaging if enigmatic production. However, it got a hostile review from the Irish Times, here. An article on the tragedy from the London Independent is here.

This year's Polish film festival, Kinopolis, runs Oct 22-26 at the Cineworld Cinema on Parnell Street, Dublin, with 13 films. The festival opens with Little Moscow by Waldemar Krzysztek (reviewed here), the winner of a Golden Lion at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia in 2008. The festival concludes with the Cinema of Historic Transition - a film retrospective commemorating the 20th anniversary of the defeat of communism and the re-birth of democracy in Poland.

Renowned director Agnieszka Holland will take part in a Q&A on Saturday 24th, after a screening of 'Copying Beethoven' (trailer here), her most recent (2006) film. Holland received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for her 1985 film, 'Angry Harvest', about a Jewish woman on the run in World War II. Her best-known work is 'Europa Europa' (1991), based on the biography of Solomon Perel, a Jewish teenager who fled Germany for Poland following Kristallnacht in 1938, but who subsequently found himself enrolled in the Hitler Youth. It became one of the most successful German films released in the US, and won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay (according to Wikipedia). Holland collaborated with Krzysztof Kieślowski on the screenplay for his film, 'Three Colors: Blue'. Kieślowski's 'Decalogue X' (1988) will screen on Sunday 25th.

The programme is here and booking is here.

Today fortnight sees the start of the fifth annual Carlow Film Festival, running October 16 to 18. As well as the film programme, there is a symposium on October 17 titled 'Effective Collaboration: Instrument of Development in the African Movie Industry', featuring Afolabi Adesanya of the Nigerian Film Corporation, Susan Wamburi a film director and producer with the Kenyan Ministry of Information and Communication and one of Nollywood's most prominent/prolific directors, Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen. The screenings programme is here. During the festival, a call for submissions for 2010's festival will be announced. The festival director is Nigerian Ade Oke, who presents a multicultural show on KCLR radio station, The Rainbow. That leads me to a conference paper presented by the director of programmes at KCLR, Mags Murphy, on the potential of local radio to provide more accurate images of developing countries, in which she cites Oke's show. The paper was presented at the annual Cleraun media conference.

An apparent cookery programme might be a less obvious source of stories on migration, but then Hidden Kitchens is no ordinary cookery programme. Produced by the Kitchen Sisters, a leading American radio duo, the series explores the world of hidden kitchens and how communities come together through food. Being the US, many of these communities are immigrant in origin. See, for example, the episodes 'Birth Of Rice-A-Roni: The Armenian-Italian Treat', about how a friendship between a Canadian immigrant and a survivor of the Armenian genocide led to the creation of a popular San Francisco dish, or 'The Sheepherder's Ball: Hidden Basque Kitchens'. Short and sublime radio essays: one of their characteristic features is the lack of a voiceover, with all contributors introducing themselves. More than merely a stylistic device, this is indicative of a deeply democratic ethos underlying the Kitchen Sisters' work.

Political anoraks will thrill to the new Irish website, KildareStreet.com, a non-partisan site which 'aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their elected representatives in the Houses of the Oireachtas'. The site allows an easy-to-use search of the websites and transcripts of the Irish houses of parliament, the Oireachtas (comprising the Dáil and the Seanad). The Oireachtas has its own site, but this is more unwieldy.

A search today for 'immigration' brought up these results, amongst them (for example), a written answer by Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern to a question on an unnamed individual's application for asylum. You can receive email alerts every time a particular person speaks, or a key word (eg. asylum) is said in the Oireachtas.

The site is still in beta (ie. trial), and does not feature the same range of features as the British equivalent, on which it is based, TheyWorkForYou. This allows much more comprehensive analysis of individual MPs' records. This site is run by mysociety.org, a British charitable organisation that 'builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives (and) teaches the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the internet most efficiently to improve lives'. More about their work here.

One of the consequences of the international economic downturn has been a weakening in the commercial position of newspapers, and an apparent acceleration in the trend towards providing and consuming news online. One offshoot of this has been a gathering of forces amongst investigative journalists seeking to use the internet to pursue and publish their stories. The Center for Investigative Reporting in California is a long-standing non-profit investigative centre, publishing multimedia work.

Their mission statement is worth quoting at length: 'We are living in an age of upheaval, institutional collapse, and historic unforeseen change. And journalism is not immune. The only “business” protected by the Constitution, the business of informing the public, has been eviscerated in recent years. The role that journalism plays in a functioning democracy—informing the public and holding the powerful accountable—is at serious risk. Major issues affecting the very fabric of this nation and the world go uninvestigated. As we struggle to find solutions to two wars, climate change, immigration, a recession, and myriad other global issues, a thriving media is more important than ever.

'CIR is working to ensure that high-quality, credible, unique journalism does not die, but flourishes. Our innovative new model relies on in-depth collaboration with other news organizations, journalists, public policy organizations and universities, and fully exploits new storytelling technologies, to provide citizens—local and global—with critical, actionable information that impacts their lives. Important to this model is our search for new revenue streams that can help sustain high-quality journalism in a digital age.'

A portfolio of CIR investigations is here. Amongst them is a story from June this year, 'Immigration Courts Make Do With Limited Resources Despite Mounting Caseloads'. This was a collaboration with truthdig.com, a 'progressive' current affairs web magazine. Truthdig's list of stories on immigration is here

Cited in the above article is another piece in The Nation on 'secret courts' exploiting immigrants. The Nation's list of stories tagged Migration & Immigration is here.

Here at Migration Matters we find ourselves spending increasing amounts of time on online social networks, and not just poking people. Facebook still seems to be largely about having fun (during working hours), but there are other, smaller social networks dedicated to more serious matters.

One such is Africa Media Network, which describes itself as a 'networking community for people who are professionally involved in the African Media Industry'. You can sign up more or less immediately, and then contribute blog posts and start discussions. One discussion from earlier this year was on human trafficking, anticipating the impact of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

This network is hosted by Ning, a platform for creating your own special-interest social network. A quick search for social networks on Ning dealing with migration issues throws up Team Grassfire, a US network providing 'a place for conservatives to get informed, connected and engaged', and (for balance) freeDimensional, an international activists & arts community. Perhaps Migration Matters should be amongst them?

Another network of potential interest, though not using the social network form and somewhat clunky in its web design, is the AfricaNews network of African reporters. A search for contributions on migration issues produced this list.

Let us know about any interesting examples of social networks out there. Email migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org.

On tonight (Friday) and Saturday, at the Teachers' Club on Parnell Square, Dublin: Polish theatre director Darek Skibiński, of A3 Teatr stages an experimental production, 'The Boot's on the Other Foot', based on a workshop held with young Polish and Irish actors. The workshop and performance are based on the 'Minimal Art' method: according to the pre-publicity, 'Post-Kantor theatrical Minimal-Art aims to unearth the emotional and physical cohesion of the performers and the truth of the characters they present. These truths, and the truths of each intention and situation, get further tested through absurdity, deformation and a peeling away of the blurring pathos.' I have no idea what that means, but it's certainly intriguing.

This has been facilitated by ArtPolonia, a Polish-Irish cultural exchange centre in Dublin. ArtPolonia has just moved into a new venue, the new Centre for Creative Practices. For Culture Night, tonight, the centre will celebrate with an open day from 12pm to 11pm, with a programme of workshops and talks. There's more on culture night here.

Incidentally, the recent Polish production in the Dublin Fringe festival, 'Emigrants', was reviewed here. Meanwhile, I wrote a piece on Gerardo Naumann's play in the Fringe, 'A Useful Play', which used 'post-dramatic' techniques to explore the story of a Bolivian immigrant to Argentina, here.

The UK Refugee Week this year ran a 'Simple Acts' campaign with an online video component. Various people recorded videos of themselves defining the word 'refuge', and posted them on wordia, a website devoted to video definitions of words (ie. a searchable video dictionary). The Archbishop of Cantebury's definition is here. There was also a parallel YouTube channel. 

It's an intriguing idea, which would seem to have some potential for a 'viral' impact, with members of the public uploading their own videos, but the campaign does not appear to have got much traction, with just a dozen videos on YouTube. 

The campaign also included these written contributions on refuge from established authors.

Placing Voices - Voicing Places is a collaborative project exploring 'the meaning of heritage for 21st century Ireland', and there's much in it of interest.

One component is the Home Project, a project led by curator Ian Russell and playwright Ursula Rani Sarma, to explore the concept of 'home' against the changing landscape of the past, present and future of the inner-city Clanbrassil Street area in Dublin.

The words for the project are taken from a series of creative writing workshops run by Sarma with 10-12 year olds. A postcard was designed and was distributed throughout Dublin, and in July, a selection of statements about 'home' were chosen and stenciled onto both footpaths of Clanbrassil Street. (See the photos on flickr here.) The children's statements were collated in a simple booklet, which can be downloaded here.

Amongst those contributing are Abdi Salem Taher Haji, who writes that 'home is the place where you live with your family', and quotes his father: 'I used to live in a small village in Somalia. I like living near my son's school. Home is one place because I only have one.'

Placing Voices - Voicing Places explores what heritage means to people today and how heritage has a central role to play in the integration of a multicultural Ireland. It is a collaboration between University College Dublin, CREATE and Dublin City Council, bringing together archaeologists, artists, policy analysts, local government officials and sociologists to work with the diverse communities of inner-city Dublin in articulating and exploring the many heritages that are part of their everyday lives. 

Another of its publications is a zine on the history of Clanbrassil Street, which can be downloaded here. The latest issue of Create's newsletter can be downloaded here. It features an interview with Tadhg O'Keefe on histories and Heritages beyond the surface.

The American online journal McSweeneys is always fruitful territory for Migration Matters, and a quick look there points in some typically interesting directions...

The Voice of Witness project is a series of books of oral history from crisis zones, which was inspired by Dave Eggers's collaboration with Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng in 'What is the What'.

The Voice of Witness site leads me to this interview with the editor of the volume 'Out of Exile' in an attractive online cultural magazine, 'The Rumpus', and to this trailer for a HBO documentary on child migration, 'Which Way Home'.

Also on the site are links for Dave Eggers's latest book, a documentary account of the struggle of a Muslim family from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There's an interview with Eggers on altmuslim.com here. There are reviews of the book, which sounds fascinating, here. From Salon:

'Zeitoun is a story about the Bush administration's two most egregious policy disasters — the War on Terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina — as they collide with each other and come crashing down on one family. Eggers tells the story entirely from the perspective of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun.. At first, as a reader, I felt some resistance to this tactic — could the Zeitouns possibly be as wholesome and all-American as Eggers depicts them? — but the sheer momentum, emotional force and imagistic power of the narrative finally sweep such objections away.'

Not really related to migration issues, though certainly an interesting use of mainstream media to highlight social issues, 'Assignment Detroit' is a year-long project by Time Inc to investigate the predicament of the blighted US city of Detroit, as Roy Greenslade explains in the Guardian. Time Inc has bought a house in the city and tasked reporters from its stable of publications to spend time there and find stories. There's a smart, short vox pop video introducing the project, 'How to Survive in Detroit', here.

Looking ahead to the Dublin Theatre Festival, which opens on September 24, there are a couple of shows of particular interest. Foremost amongst them is 'The Blue Dragon' (October 7-10), the latest theatre work by the Canadian theatre and film maker, Robert Lepage. Lepage is of interest for two reasons: his work is steeped in multicultural references, and he is a pioneer of technology-driven innovation in the theatre, where he has attempted to create something of a fusion of cinema and live performance. Lepage is Quebecois who is entirely comfortable in English, and his early work explored bilingualism and Canada's bifurcated identity. He made his name internationally with 'The Dragon's Trilogy' in 1985, an epic which told stories of three Chinatowns in Canada. 'The Blue Dragon' returns to the hero of that earlier play, 25 years on, and finds him now living in China. Tickets & info here. There is an extensive interview with Lepage here.

I spoke to Lepage during the week for my theatre column for the Irish Independent, which I will post here once published. In the meantime, he referenced a recent French production called 'Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées)' which played in New York in 2005. This was a six-hour theatre work by Ariane Mnouchkine's Paris-based Théâtre du Soleil that explored the phenomenon of asylum and refuge, and Lepage said it was extraordinary.

According to the New York Times, the show was 'based on letters, interviews and testimonials collected by Ms. Mnouchkine and assistants from several years of visits to refugee camps and detention centers in Sangatte, France; Sydney, Australia; Auckland, New Zealand; and Indonesia. It was developed, as are most of Ms. Mnouchkine's productions, slowly and painstakingly, with the cast of 36 drawing on their own experiences in improvisational workshops. (Ms. Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil collective is a thoroughly international organization, with 25 nationalities represented.)

'The arduous process involved in the show's creation imbues it with the kind of specificity and vividness you normally find only in documentary film...

'Ms. Mnouchkine and her remarkable assembly of artists evoke the struggles and suffering of their subjects with a simplicity and compassion that allows the production to transcend its few aesthetic miscalculations. Despite its broad scope, "Caravansérail" is a profoundly intimate theatrical work that brings us into uncomfortable communion with the everyday anguish of men and women fleeing oppression and violence at home, only to discover that the indifference of the wider world can be equally brutalizing.'

According to the Guardian, 'Le Dernier Caravansérail opens with a vast storm, an army of stage-hands agitating an immense billowing stage-cloth. We are, a slide informs us, on the Kyrgyzstan/ Kazakhstan border. A tiny boat, packed with people who have paid their dues to smugglers, is attempting to navigate the crossing. The wind threatens to whip them out of the boat. Some founder. One makes it to the other side, only to be shot by a smuggler. He hasn't paid.

'What follows draws on hundreds of taped conversations, the migrants' stories of family, fanatic oppression back home, dangers in the camps, on railway sidings and on the road. These tales are brief, laconic and often surreal. An amputee in Sangatte receives his metal crutch and plays "All the lonely people" on it like a flute. A beggar slumped beneath a telephone on a Moscow street picks through his old medals: "Chechnya ... Afghanistan ..." A young woman returns from a demonstration to a living room in Teheran. She screams when her father hugs her: her back has been whipped raw by the faithful. Talibans cluster salaciously around a house in Kabul where a couple are making love.

'These scenes are played by a company of actors who, like the stories, originate from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and Russia. They play what dialogue there is in their own or each other's language, subtitled. The French philosopher Hélène Cixous accompanied Mnouchkine on her visits to the camps, and tried to write a play based on the stories. But that text felt too constructed and "aesthetic". In the end it was set aside, and the speeches and scenes were improvised.

'Le Dernier Caravansérail doesn't go in for economic or political overviews; instead, it confines itself to the real experiences of the actors and the inhabitants of refugee camps. The recorded voices of the original tellers punctuate the action, and what they say is striking. One woman, who was denied education in a fundamentalist theocracy, insists: "Both women and men must study. It's not right that only men study. In our religion, knowledge is a matter for all Muslims. In our religion, it's said that one must study and study as much as one can. We have to go on studying right to the edge of the grave." Such voices give the play the immediacy and intimacy of a radio documentary.'

There is another account of it here.

This year's festival has a strand of 'documentary theatre', plays created based on the experiences of 'real' people rather than fictionalised dramas. 'Radio Muezzin' (October 6-11) is particularly interesting. By the German company Rimini Protokoll, it tells the story of four of Cairo’s Muezzins as they challenge the Egyptian government’s decision to centralise the call to prayer, showing the devastating effect it will have for tens of thousands of lives. Tickets & info here.

Rimini Protokoll have previously brought some intriguing shows to Dublin. 'Cargo Sofia' took place in the back of a truck as it rolled through Dublin's Docklands, and its Bulgarian drivers told of their lives on the road. 'Call Cutta in a Box' took place, essentially, on the phone, as the audience had individual conversations with employees of an Indian call centre. I wrote about that here.

The company will participate in a post-show discussion on October 7, and the Festival is hosting a panel discussion on documentary theatre in the Samuel Beckett Theatre on October 10 at 4.30pm.

Immigrants are overwhelmingly choosing to stay put in their adopted countries, rather than return home, despite the impact of the economic downturn on employment, according to a new report by the Migration Policy Institute for BBC World Service. 'Migration and the Global Recession' reports that some migration flows, particularly illegal migration, are also down as would-be migrants are being deterred by reduced job prospects in countries that would previously have offered them better opportunities.

The report focuses on migration flows to and from the major migrant-destination regions of the world, including: the United States, European Union, Canada and Australia; as well as movement in major migration corridors: the United States-Mexico; United Kingdom-Eastern Europe; Spain-Romania and Spain-Morocco; and Gulf State flows from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and the Philippines.

The 130-page report provides data on migration, remittances, employment and poverty rates for immigrants and the native-born alike; and examines the policy changes some countries have enacted to suppress migrant inflows, encourage departures (including through recent “pay-to-go” plans) and protect labor markets for native-born workers.

The report also examines internal migration in China, and how the recession affected the 70 million rural migrant workers who returned to their hometowns for the 2009 Chinese New Year, in what amounts to the world’s largest annual movement of people.

The report can be download here. There's a related story on the BBC here.

A Kenyan TV company has boldly gone where very few have dared - or managed - to go before (reports Reuters AlertNet, a good source on 'humanitarian' issues): they have gathered rare footage of the Oromo Liberation Front and the insurgency they are fighting in Ethiopia's south. The Ethiopian government bars all access to this region and has tried to force the four-part documentary series off the air, but you can watch it on YouTube. The report is by NTV. It has has 22,500 hits on YouTube.

The Oromo Liberation Front has been fighting for self-determination for the Oromo people against what they call "Abyssinian colonial rule" since the early 1970s. It has been designated a terrorist organization by the Ethiopian government. See Wikipedia and this and other reports on Refworld, which is UNHCR's online information database.

Architecture is one medium we have never yet featured on Migration Matters. However, a notification from the Forced Migration Studies Programme in Johannesburg of an upcoming guest lecture (on September 23) has alerted me to the work of the San Francisco architectural firm, Public Architecture. They have developed a design for a 'Day Labor Station' to provide facilities for the growing numbers of (mostly Hispanic) day labourers that gather at key point in US cities seeking construction and other work.

Public Architecture practices and proselytises for 'pro bono architecture'. The firm 'puts the resources of architecture in the service of the public interest. We identify and solve practical problems of human interaction in the built environment and act as a catalyst for public discourse through education, advocacy and the design of public spaces and amenities,' they say.

'Can't sophisticated design serve social justice? It can, and it should. The distinction between progressive design and popular design is a class prejudice—and a red herring. Public Architecture brings the values of design—formal innovation, intellectual currency, critical appraisal of the status quo—to bear on real problems in our communities.'

Their Day Labor Station 'is a simple, flexible structure [to be erected at] informal day labor locations. It is a sustainably-designed project that utilizes green materials and strategies and exists primarily, if not completely, off-the-grid. It provides a sheltered space for the day laborers to wait for work as well as greater community amenities and resources. Our design is a responsive one, addressing the needs and desires of the day laborers themselves, as our clients. As such, the structure will be flexible enough to serve in various capacities, including as a meeting space or classroom.

'Despite day laborers' contributions to key economic sectors of our society, they receive little in return. Their role in the informal economy has forced them to occupy spaces meant for other uses, such as street corners, gas stations, and home improvement store parking lots. A relatively small number of officially sanctioned day labor centers have appeared in recent years, but the previously mentioned informal gathering sites remain the norm. These sites are far from being ideal; their presence in spaces designated for other uses means that they often lack even the most basic of amenities (shelter, water, toilet facilities, etc).

'Conscious of the controversy surrounding day laborers, our goal is not to cast an opinion about public policy. Instead, we seek to fulfill our professional responsibility: to give day laborers a more dignified environment and to advance the debate about day laborers and the spaces they inhabit.

'The Day Labor Station project was introduced as part of the Design for the Other 90% exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York... However, this project is intended to be more than just a museum piece; we are actively working to locate a day labor site, which can serve as a permanent home for the first full prototype. Ultimately, Day Labor Stations will be deployed across the country.'

There is a gallery of images here, a radio debate on day labourers from NPR here, and a list of affiliated firms and organisations here.

Liz Ogbu is the member of Public Architecture due to speak in Johannesburg. She has an essay on the Day Labor Station project here. She writes: 'In proposing the Day Labor Station, Public Architecture is identifying the day laborer, not a municipal entity or a nonprofit, as its client. As such, we acknowledge their individual and collective voices: their realities, their needs, and their desires. The social structure that forms the underpinnings of their lives is not viewed as an appendage that will adapt to whatever structure is built, but instead an armature on which the design is based. With this perspective and with further research, and creative exploration, Public Architecture seeks to produce an actual product that provides an institutional spatial visibility to the day laborers and engages the debate around their presence in a new light.'

I wrote last month (see the Special Report on 21/08/09) about my recent trip to Angola, a country whose history has in many ways been critically shaped by migration. 'Angola After the War' is a one-minute documentary I've just completed, the first installment in an ongoing documentary project looking at the history of the town of Kuito. It is being entered into a competition in the Darklight digital film festival, which runs in Dublin from October 8 to 11. The programme is here.

This article from the LA Times investigates the facts behind an email chain letter about the impact of 'illegal' immigrants.

Reporter Hector Tobar wrote a sympathetic story about Mexican immigrants, and attracted an email calling him a 'crybaby' and citing statistics claiming that social services were being overwhelmed. He decided to check on the claims in the mail (which was being circulated as a chain mail). Here's an excerpt:

'What did I find? A stew made up for the most part of meaty exaggerations and spicy conjecture, mixed in with some giblets of truth. Two of the "stats" are the musings of a conservative op-ed writer. Another takes its information from a government "report" that is, in fact, a work of fiction...

'Here they are, from 1 to 10:

1. "40% of all workers in L.A. County are working for cash and not paying taxes. . . . This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card."

The source of this information seems to be a 2005 study by the Economic Roundtable on the informal economy in Los Angeles County. Its findings were reported in The Times and other papers.

But the chain-mail's author more than doubled the figures in that study, which estimated that 15% of the county workforce was outside the regulated economy in 2004. Illegal immigrants getting paid in cash, it said, probably made up about 9% of the workforce.

A later Economic Roundtable report, by the way, credited immigrants with keeping the local economy from shrinking in the 1990s.

2. "95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens . . . "

We traced this "fact" to a 2004 op-ed in The Times by Heather Mac Donald of the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Mac Donald said "officers" told her about the warrants. She conceded that there were no such data in official reports but suggested the LAPD "top brass" was hiding the truth.

I called the LAPD's press office, which contacted the department's Fugitive Warrant Section. Officers confirmed that the statistics in item No. 2 and No. 3, which follows, don't exist.

3. "75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens."

We traced this figure to something circulating on the Internet under the name "the 2006 (First Quarter) INS/FBI Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants." The "report" contains similar figures for Phoenix, Albuquerque and other cities. But it isn't an actual government document. The INS ceased to exist in 2003, after the Department of Homeland Security was created...

4. "Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal, whose births were paid for by taxpayers."

Once again the "statistic" more than doubles the actual figures. According to a 2006 story in The Times, there were 41,240 Medi-Cal births to "undocumented women" in the county in 2004. They accounted for 27% of all births.'

It's a useful examination of how statistics can be distorted, misused and made up. Read the rest here.

Some general surfing this week threw up some interesting sites and insights, not related specifically to migration issues, but with the potential for exploitation by readers and interest groups.

Arts Audiences is a new Arts Council project being run by filmmaker and director of the Stranger Than Fiction documentary festival James Kelly. The project is looking at how the internet can be used by arts organisations to develop their audience ('Audience 2.0'...) and therefore is of potential interest to anybody producing creative media. More details here.

A post by James led me to this video, 'Social Media Revolution', on YouTube, which should be mandatory watching for anybody who isn't sure quite what Facebook is and why anybody bothers blogging. The video is a spin off of Erik Qualman's 'Socialnomics'.

More details on the figures cited, including sources, is here. The comments suggest that (as you might have guessed from the video) there is a level of slippage between the original data and the claims being made in the video. Take it as a piece of polemic rather than hard science. I think it's usefully provocative.

Arts Audience has some related, Irish-based information here. One impressive figure cited is that the Barbican arts centre in London generated £110,000 in ticket sales through a single mail shot to its email list (of 100,000 names) - a pound per email.

Searching for migrant-issues organisations utilising social media brought me to this article from the Toronto City News about LoonLounge, a Canadian initiative that describes itself as an immigration and settlement online community'.

('LoonLounge was created to improve the Canadian immigration process for the millions of people involved... By facilitating communication and centralizing member information, the purpose of LoonLounge is to empower Canadian residents, immigrants, and potential immigrants with the knowledge we need to build a stronger Canada together.')

There's clearly much more out there, though. Readers with their own experiences of using social media for either producing and distributing media, or for organising, are welcome to send on any links or information. Email me at migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org. As always, new readers can subscribe to Migration Matters here to receive the weekly email update.

Last week's 'Humanitarian Heads Up' from Reuters AlertNet looked at Pakistan, where hundreds of thousands of people have returned home to the battle-scarred Swat Valley:

'Pakistan has been encouraging more than 2.3 million people to return to homes in the Swat Valley and wider northwest region which they fled in April when the government launched an offensive to retake the area from Taliban control.

'Those who have returned - and officials estimate over 80 percent have now gone home - face unexploded ordnance, sporadic militant attacks and a lack of basic services . Hospitals and clinics were looted, vandalised or destroyed in the fighting, and many health staff have not yet returned.

'Government officials have dismissed concerns from aid workers that returnees are at risk while the army conducts its mopping up operations, and say people help the army hunt down remaining militants.Aid agencies have, by and large, applauded the government's response to this crisis.

'But some say the return process may have started too early, with huge numbers returning in a short space of time - more than 1.3 million people have returned since the beginning of July.

'Meanwhile a lot of the displaced have experienced post-traumatic stress syndrome and many women have stopped breastfeeding because of mental stress , says Maria-Luiza Galer, country director for Merlin. 

'Some families will remain displaced over the winter because of ongoing fighting near their homes, says Manuel Bessler, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The newsletter contains a list of contacts in the region for media seeking more information or a report.

Pakistanis rally to support the war-affected – AlertNet

Fresh clashes in Pakistan's Swat valley; dozens killed – Reuters

Amputees bear lifelong cost of Pakistan's conflict – Reuters

INTERVIEW-Having baby full of risks in Pakistani conflict zone - AlertNet

INTERVIEW-Over 80 pct of Pakistan's war-displaced return home– AlertNet

INTERVIEW-Some Pakistan war displaced must winter in camps-UN - AlertNet

A Clash of Principles? Humanitarian Action and the Search for Stability in Pakistan – Humanitarian Policy Group

The Swat Conflict: An Arc of Instability Spreading from Afghanistan to Central Asia and Xinjiang - The Jamestown Foundation // Global Terrorism Analysis

In the Irish Times on August 29, Declan Kiberd wrote a provocative essay on contemporary Irish culture. He had some interesting points to make on the role of immigrants in Irish society and culture in recent years, and in the years to come:

'Sometimes, when a people are about to surrender a culture, outsiders come to its rescue. It was TS Eliot, a young man from St Louis, Missouri, who saved English poetry in the 1920s, abetted ably by other outsiders like Pound and Yeats. In the previous generation, the English novel had been reconfigured by an American named James and a Pole named Conrad – as it would be by Joyce in the next decades. All cultures which survive strongly do so because they are open to injections of new life from without.

'It would not, therefore, be altogether surprising if immigrant writers from Africa or Eastern Europe reopened a dialogue with Cúchulainn and Deirdre. They may well find inspiration and new meaning in these marginal figures, who exist still as buried memories of that landscape in which these newcomers are choosing to live...

'The Irish State was solidly established, but the cultural domain, in whose name the whole separatist agitation had been mounted, remained largely marginal, even tokenistic. The family, named as the basis of society in the 1937 Constitution, often functioned as an alternative to the social itself. By the last century’s end, despite the growth of the State, there had been a further shrinkage of the cultural “public sphere”. By then, most people owned cars in which they hurried through streets from one private experience to another. Gated communities emerged on the edge of towns, in which domestic dwellings got much bigger. It was often left to immigrants to become the most enthusiastic users of streets, parks, beaches, galleries – as if Old Ireland were retreating into privatised space. 

'To understand what a huge reversal this represented, one has only to think of Ulysses , in which “street people” , far from constituting a problem, are seen as vital to a full civic life. In the free circulation of persons through all of Dublin’s streets, a young poet can confront his own inner strangeness by taking a late-night bread-roll and coffee with a Jewish ad-canvasser. By the 1990s such meetings seemed less and less likely. Even though the streets of Ireland contained many migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, the literature produced in Tiger Ireland (with some honourable exceptions) seemed largely incurious about the Other. Instead of attempting a total portrait of a city or society, writers tended to focus on this or that sub-group...' Read the essay here.

Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD and author of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (reviewed here).

This week's Migration Information Source e-newletter features a new country profile of Ireland, originally written by Martin Ruhs of COMPAS as Oxford, and updated by the ESRI's Emma Quinn. 

Some of the key points:

'If international economic conditions improve, large-scale Irish emigration could resume. There are some indications this may happen: emigration rates overall rose 25 percent between 2006 and 2008. However, net migration remains strongly positive.' 

I should clarify that headline: this is a post about Twitter, not an announcement that Migration Matters is climbing aboard the Twitter train (yet, anyway). It occurs to me that many readers may be slightly bemused by the rise of Twitter as a force, if not yet in their lives, in virtual word at least. And some may be skeptical. However, references to it have become obligatory for any self-respecting commentator on popular culture, and as a result is appears to be ubiquitous. I thought it time Migration Matters took a look.

The reason it's of interest at all is largely due to two events this summer. The elections in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson were the first global stories to shape, and be shaped by, Twitter as a new medium. In both cases, Twitter broke stories. In the case of Iran, Twitter itself became a force in the development of that story, as it became a tool for mobilising dissent, as well as reporting it. In the case of Jackson's death, though Twitter obviously didn't affect it, it did set the tone for the initial coverage, which echoed that of the death of Lady Diana in its effusiveness and emotionalism. (For more on Twitter in Iran, see here, and for Twitter and Jackson's death, see here.)

So what is it? Twitter is basically a refinement of blogging - ie, the habit of writing short notes about your life and publishing them on the web. Essentially, it's designed for people who want to process greater quantities of trivial information, more quickly - though, as Iran proved, that information needn't be trivial. 

You can sign up for Twitter in about two minutes here. Wikipedia explains it here and there's an article about how it works, and where it comes from, here. Of interest to anyone also wrestling with the challenge of producing online video will be this short guide to Twitter produced by CommonCraft, specialists in making three-minute educational videos. (I was very impressed by the style and concision of this.)

So, to Migration Matters: what's happening on Twitter of interest to us? A quick search of Twitter for 'immigration' yields these results, showing that there's plenty of people tweeting about the subject. Immigrations is a particularly prolific tweeter.

A search for 'migration' in the 'Find People' section yields these results. MigrantHistory is the Twitter page for the NSW Migration Heritage Centre, in Australia. MigrationMuseum is the page for the Migration Museum in Adelaide.

Very curiously, this search seems to be pulling up entirely Australian tweeters. A search for 'migrant' leads me to Migrant Rights, the twitter page of this organisation in the Middle East.

In short, there's plenty of action on Twitter. That said, Migration Matters won't be tweeting just yet. We're busy enough getting to grips with the blogosphere. 

Adam Curtis is a television documentary maker with the BBC whose next project is to be a documentary looking at the history of the West's relationship with the Congo. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, as readers will know, is the scene of one of the worst contemporary displacement crises: some online media here and here (though this latter piece, from the Irish Times, is marred by its reliance on some of the tropes of reporting on Congo, and Africa generally). However, this report isn't about Congo, or really about migration issues. Instead, it's a look at Adam Curtis.

Curtis has made numerous influential documentary series for the BBC, specialising in the use of archive footage (Wikipedia has a list with links). More recently, he has been experimenting with online video and other innovations, specifically a collaboration with the pioneering British theatre company, Punchdrunk.

In the Sunday Times recently, Bryan Appleyard explained:

'Indulged by the BBC, Curtis nevertheless feels that many of his employer’s ideas — notably its obsession with “multi-platform”, involving the internet, mobiles, podcasts and so on — fail to correspond with reality. He’s a web sceptic, and the ideology of the internet is the subject of a future series. It occurred to him, though, that the BBC’s neophilia did suggest an entirely new way of making documentaries. Thanks to the iPlayer and other technologies, people can now watch programmes many times. Yet all Curtis’s training was based on one prime directive — keep it simple, they’ll only see it once. Now, why not let it be as complex as it needs to be?

'“I was marching round the BBC saying, ‘If we can watch films over again on iPlayer, then the form is going to change. We can start making more complicated, more involving films, of different lengths.’” So he suggested a series of experimental films, dispensing with most of the conventions of documentary-making. This being Curtis, they said yes, but then, when he delivered, they got jumpy and gave him his own website instead.'

The website doesn't appear to be fully functional at the moment. However, there are selections of Curtis's work on Google Videos (this link brings you to his recent five minute film, 'The Rise and Fall of the Television Journalist as Hero') and YouTube. There's a trailer for Curtis's latest film, 'It Felt Like a Kiss', with an article, on the Guardian site, here.

'It Felt Like a Kiss' involved a collaboration with Punchdrunk, and premiered as a theatre installation in Manchester earlier this summer. The Guardian's theatre critic, Michael Billington, reviews it here. (There are reports it may be transferring to London later this year.) I've written about Punchdrunk and the trend towards making theatre in unconventional spaces for my column in this coming Saturday's Irish Independent and will link to that here next week.  

The Sunday Times's Bryan Appleyard keeps a blog, 'Thought Experiments', here.

Many readers will know the feeling: a pile of old Irish Times papers teeters in the corner, threatening to overwhelm the living room. Family members demand that they be thrown out; you insist that you're just about to read them. Well, I finally tackled my pile at the weekend and amongst the articles buried therein was this piece by Fintan O'Toole on the Jewish-Irish editor and writer, David Marcus, whose death becomes the cue for a meditation on the nature of diasporic communities and cultural integration.

O'Toole writes:

'David Marcus’s passing reminds us of the extraordinary and disproportionately significant contribution to 20th-century Irish culture of the small Jewish community from which he sprang. That community, largely concentrated in Dublin, Cork and Belfast, was never much more than 4,000 strong. Much of it, moreover, had its origins in a single shtetl in Lithuania...

'The passing of David Marcus does remind us that the Jewish community in Ireland is in decline and that the riches it has created can no longer be taken for granted. And this in turn makes it appropriate to ask what the experience of this remarkable enrichment of Irish culture by a Diaspora community has to tell us for the future.

'Much of what it suggests is obvious but needs to be repeated. The first point is that paranoia about an indigenous culture being somehow adulterated or weakened by immigration has no relationship to reality. Like the Irish communities around the world, the Jewish community in Ireland significantly strengthened the indigenous culture, both directly through the work of its own members and indirectly through its influence on indigenous artists (both Joyce and Beckett, for example.) The second lesson is that crude notions of “assimilation” are wrong-headed for many reasons, one of them cultural. Why do immigrant communities make a disproportionately large cultural contribution? Because they are complicated. Simple assimilation seeks to flatten out complexities, to absorb all differences into an assumed norm (which is usually itself a fiction). This is the opposite of art, which lives in ambiguities and uncertainties and enriches the world by hovering between different realities. Immigrant communities need to be integrated (and the integration of Jews into Irish artistic, political, professional and intellectual life is a fine example to follow) but they should not be expected to cease to have another life of memories and meanings.'

Further resources:

O'Toole cites Dermot Keogh's Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Refugees, Antisemitism and the Holocaust.

There is a website for the Irish-Jewish community here and a gallery of images of the Irish Jewish Museum here. The long-standing curator of the Jewish Museum, Raphael Siev, died last January. There are obituaries here and here.

On a related subject, O'Toole earlier this year wrote about a play by Conall Quinn that explored something of Ireland's Jewish history (albeit through a historical counter-factual), 'The Death of Harry Leon'. That article is here. I wrote about the play and its author here.

One of the most interesting aspects of my recent trip to Angola was the opportunity to witness the emergence of China as a prominent actor in Angolan, and African, development and politics. Current TV's roving correspondent Mariana van Zeller has a report here and there's a short overview on Current.com here. There's a substantial overview on Migration Information Source here. French journalists Serge Michel and Michel Beuret have recently published 'China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa', which was reviewed in the New York Times here, and featured on NPR here and on Democracy Now! here. Time has a photo essay here. BBC Online ran a series of reports on the issue in 2007, here.

Also at the Absolut Fringe (as Dublin's fringe festival is now known) are Polish company Wiczy Theatre with 'Emigrants'. According to the blurb, this is a 'cramped reality show with 1 camper van, 2 emigrants, and 11 spectators'.

'Down on Cow’s Lane you’ll see a battered Mercedes camper van sitting forlornly at the kerb. After you and 12 others cram into it, you’ll find two Polish migrant workers engaging in a faintly absurdist tragic-comedy. As you knock knees with them, the men, XX and AA, lurch from an existential debate about eating a can of dog-food to a boozy exchange of philosophies over a melancholy New Year’s drink. Based on Slawomir Mrozek’s famous 1974 play, this vivid play questions the motives of migration, from raw economic need to a much more nebulous yearning for freedom.' So they say.

That's at Cow's Lane from September 5 to 11, with two shows nightly at 17.30 and 19.30. Tickets here.

While immigration, diaspora and multicultural issues have been prominent in the theatre and fringe festivals in Dublin in recent years, it's not evident from the Fringe programme that this is the case this year. (Though it's not very evident from the programme what is happening in the festival, such is the enthusiasm for 'post-dramatic' forms and jargon.) In any case, there are two shows which, on the face of it, may be of interest here.

Edit Kaldor is certainly someone who has lived a migrant's life: an émigré from Budapest to New York, now living and working between Amsterdam and Brussels. She brings 'Point Blank' to the Fringe. Here's some information on it

'The definitive spy-ware performance - a voyeur's paradise. Kaldor invites the 19-year-old Nada to present her large collection of photographs - for years she has been observing people, taking 'spy-photos' of them, capturing their private moments. The core of Nada's interest is to trace the various life-strategies that people follow. Driven by curiosity, she becomes witness to a wide range of - at times excessive - human behavior. Together with the audience she autopsies the images, implications and patterns that emerge. She aims to get a comprehensive overview and reach the ultimate conclusion: the vision of a life worth pursuing.

'Edit Kaldor was born in Budapest. At the age of 13 she immigrated with her mother to the United States, where she lived for ten years. After receiving her degree in English and Theater at Barnard College (New York) and University College (London), she worked for 6 years with Peter Halasz (Squat theater/Love theater, New York), collaborating on numerous theater performances and filmscripts. She then enrolled at DasArts (the postgraduate performing arts center in Amsterdam), where she started making her own theatre pieces, which soon received international acclaim. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam and Brussels and makes theater performances that tend to integrate the use of digital media, like Or Press Escape (2002), New Game (2004), Drama (2005), Point Blank (2007). In the past years she has been invited to perform her work in about 30 countries around the world.'

(Runs September 5-8 at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 6pm. Tickets here.)

As Irish emigrants docked in New York in the mid 19th century, some of the men found themselves drafted immediately into the US army - not just during the Civil War of the 1860s, but during the earlier war with Mexico that coincided with the Great Famine, 1846-1848. One large group of these, apparently largely forgotten here, went on to have a significant impact on the war, and are well remembered in Mexico. These were a group of 500 or so defectors from the US army, who deserted in protest at their treatment by US officers. They formed the San Patricios Battallion, fighting at every major battle in the war, and were ultimately defeated at Churubusco. Following that defeat, 47 Irishmen were executed.
Irish writer Larry O’Loughlin has written a play about these men, '100 More Like These', and it is about to embark on a short tour to the Electric Picnic (in the Spoken Word tent, on Sunday) and then Clifden (September 10), Belmullet (September 11), Longford (September 12), and Blanchardstown (October 16). September 10-12 marks the 162nd anniversary of the executions.

O'Loughlin writes about the play's genesis here. There is some video of a schools workshop by the writer and actor here.

Mark Day has also made a documentary on the San Patricios: information here, and a YouTube clip here.

Venue details:
The Station House Theatre, Clifden, Galway, September 10th
Aras Inis Gluaire, Belmullet, Mayo, September 11th.
Backstage Theatre, Longford, September 12th.
Draoicht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown, October 16th.

I've just spent a somewhat bewildering, but enlightening hour on Current.com, the website of the tv network of Al Gore. In the wake of the 2004 US presidential election, Gore decided to set up an independent tv network to compete with the networks that dominate (and have dumbed-down) US news. As he subsequently explained: 'One of the main reasons why our political system has not been operating very well until this (the 2008) election is the deadening influence of the television medium as it has been operated' (from this speech at the Web 2.0 Summit last year).

Current TV was launched in 2005, and features a combination of user-generated content, driven to the TV network via its online sibling, Current.com, and in-house productions. All material is factual. Viewers/users can contribute both documentary segments (called 'pods') and ads (with the possibility of getting paid if their work airs on the network), and can organise and join groups to follow certain subjects online.

Though the diversity of media, programming strands, groups and ways of participating initially is at first a little confusing - with the venture having spawned its own lingo - there is clearly good content there, and the online platform is a dynamic and accessible one.

Current's News strand is here.

The news groups are here, with a short article on the groups here.

(I don't see a group devoted to migration/immigration issues - perhaps an opening there for America's Voice, or one of the US lobby groups, to tap the Current community.)

The network's in-house documentary strand is called Vanguard, and airs 30-minute programmes and shorter follow-up segments. There's a programme on migration from Mauritania to Europe here and a search list for material on migration here. And more on Vanguard here.

In Ireland, Current airs on Sky Channel 183.

Finally, the FAQ section will be invaluable to those, such as myself, outside of Current's target demographic (15-34) who therefore sometimes feel that these people are speaking a slightly different language. For example: 'Current pioneered the television industry's leading model of interactive viewer created content (VC2). Comprising roughly one-third of Current's on-air broadcast, this content is submitted via short-form, non-fiction video "pods". Viewer Created Ad Messages (VCAMs) are also open to viewers participation.'

Over the course of 70 days earlier this year, two young American filmmakers undertook a cross-continental road-trip covering 20,000 miles. Along the route, they sought out and interviewed a series of individuals with stories to tell. The filmmakers were Austin Lynch (son of director David Lynch) and Jason S, and the result, a series of more than a hundred short online videos, under the title of 'Interview Project', is being presented online by David Lynch. The videos are being released every three days, with each focussing on just one person.

In an introduction, David Lynch explains the rationale behind the project as being, simply, 'a chance to meet these people'. 'It's so fascinating to look and listen to people,' he says.

As an example, here's their interview with Jim Carter in New Mexico.

This project isn't about migration in the sense in which it's commonly covered here, though invariably some of the stories told in it deal with migration across the US. I stumbled upon it while researching the camera I used on location in Angola recently (see last week's report for more), the Sony PD 150, which was used by David Lynch to make the feature, 'Inland Empire'. (He discusses the making of the film here.) However, in its emphasis on the integrity and inherent drama of 'ordinary' people's own stories, and in its smart use of online video and distribution, I felt it echoed some aspects of our own work at FOMACS and might be illuminating for readers.

Interview Project is also on Facebook.

Your correspondent has just returned from a spell in Angola, where I was filming a documentary with seed funding from the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund of Irish Aid. One of the great themes of modern Angola history and politics is migration, and I wish to reflect briefly on this here in a special report.

In the first place, Angola was both the destination for Portuguese colonisers and the provider of a slave population exported wholesale during the 18th and 19th centuries. Angolan author Jose Eduardo Agualusa, now making waves in English-language literature thanks to belated translations of his novels, gives an elegant account of the final days of the slave trade in his epistolary novel, 'Creole'.

Angola was, of course, also a destination for missionaries - the Holy Ghost fathers (or Spiritans), who run some of Dublin's best-known private schools, maintain a strong presence there - and for colonial-era internationalist administrators and businessmen. Amongst them Roger Casement, who was British Consul in Angola from 1898 to 1900, from where he was redeployed to Congo, leading to his groundbreaking report on human rights abuses there under the rule of Belgium's King Leopold. (Casement would later be executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising.)

Portugal abandoned its colonies in Angola and Mozambique almost overnight in 1975, following a successful coup against the Salazar dictatorship, partly prompted by the army's frustration at the expenditure of men and money in the colonies. Fearing wholesale slaughter in the face of the rapid advance of three liberation armies, the Portuguese resident population also abandoned Angola: Ryszard Kapuscinski's 'Another Day of Life' has an unforgettable description of this exodus.

Amongst those I interviewed, one Angolan in the town of Kuito told how his father, a Portuguese settler, had left overnight in 1975, leaving his son (born to an Angolan woman, not the settler's wife, in one of the bairros) behind. They have never had contact since.

With independence, the country descended into civil war, from which it emerged briefly in 1992, to hold elections, which prompted a renewed and more ferocious war, and again, briefly, in 1994, and finally (and so far successfully) in 2002.

The most striking account of the country at war is Pedro Rosa Mendes's 'Bay of Tigers', an idiosyncratic account of this Portuguese journalist's journey across the country in the late 1990s. (I previously reviewed this, here; also available here.)

The war provoked huge population movements. The conflict moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers around the country, often leaving them abandoned in areas far from their homes when they were injured. Large numbers of Angolans sought refuge in Zambia in particular, largely associated with the UNITA movement. And hundreds of thousands were internally displaced. Some of these people resettled in peri-urban areas, particularly around the capital, Luanda (as documented by Development Workshop), which is now a hugely overburdened city whose bairros are apparently increasingly dangerous.

Others moved periodically, fleeing their villages as one army raided and returning when they could. In one village in Bié province, local elders told me how they had sometimes spent up to ten months living in the bush, seeking to avoid the bombardment and attacks of one or either armed forces, losing many of their community to sickness (such as malaria) or violence en route. And many sought refuge in temporary camps that arose around the inland towns such as Kuito and Huambo. In some of these sites that I visited, former camps have been formally converted into bairros, and the residents had replaced earlier hastily-built huts, often with roofs of plastic sheeting donated by aid agencies, with more sturdy and spacious (but still very poor) houses of adobe bricks and corrugated-iron roofs. In others, the camps were gone, the people returned to their places of origin (or absorbed into the towns), and markets had sprung up on the sites.

I worked in Angola in 2000-2001, and a large part of my motivation for returning, and filming, was to witness and document the free movement of people on the roads. During the war, most inland towns were effectively islands, with land travel between them both dangerous and logistically complex, due to appalling roads and lack of transport. Travelling across the country on private buses and taxis (both minibuses and jeeps - motorbike taxis are also very common, though hair-raising), I witnessed a population exhilaratingly on the move.

Though the country hugely lacks formal opportunities, Angolans are highly entrepreneurial and trade is thriving. On one journey, the women travelling in the taxi I was in (an overcrowded Hiace, which broke down half way to our destination) started discussing their trade: one had been to Dubai last year, taking advantage of the new direct flight from Luanda, to buy goods for resale in Angola, but said that Namibia was actually more cost effective. The main problem was cash: you could only bring $5000 into Dubai she said, and "$5000 is nothing for doing business". These are people who by Western standards could only be described as poor in opportunity and resources, with very limited access to such goods as formal education, employment opportunities, credit or home ownership, yet they by a constant routine of travelling and trading, bringing products to areas to which franchises and larger-scale traders have not yet penetrated, they leverage their limited resources to make small profits on very high turnovers.

But there was a yet more surprising aspect to the migrations that characterise Angola today. The town of Kuito in central Angola was long a proxy for the Angolan war itself: hugely war-damaged, ringed by vast camps of displaced people, and with a population who lived for the best part of a decade effectively besieged (there were two formal sieges of Kuito by UNITA during the 1990s, both successfully resisted, both at huge cost in lives, damage and trauma). Now, it is rapidly being rebuilt, and foremost amongst those both rebuilding, contributing and taking advantage of new opportunities are a great diversity of migrants.

There is huge Chinese investment in Angola - controversial, as in other countries in Africa, for the extent to which Chinese construction firms rely on their own, imported, labour, and for allegedly poor conditions for those workers (according to some sources, Chinese prison labour is common, with prisoners serving out their sentences in construction in Angola. In one private business in Kuito, I met an Angolan entrepreneur who had gone into partnership with a Chinese firm to run a small cement brick factory producing 2,600 bricks a day: the firm brought with it a staff of 12 labourers from China, apparently on five-year contracts. There were camps of Chinese, sometimes guarded by the military, dotted throughout the areas I passed through. It is commonly said that they do not mix greatly with the locals, though in Kuito there was tangible evidence that they do: as one young woman said to me, excitedly, "they've made [Angolan-Chinese] twins!" There are also Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans running shops and small businesses locally. (See these articles on BBC and New York Times for more on Angola-China links.)

The informal businesses of currency exchange (dollars for kwanza) and resale of mobile phone credit in Kuito are dominated by Congolese, amongst them some who are the Congo-born children of Angolan refugees or expats. These are reluctant to talk as (presumably) they are 'sans-papiers'; they complained of harassment by the local police.

Various people told me of 'Arab' businessmen and traders: I met young men from Khartoum who had rented a prominent shop space from a local and were importing various electro-domestic and household goods for retail.

There has been renewed migration from Portugal to Angola, with many of those who left in the 1970s, and/or their children, returning, and new immigrants seeking business opportunities, and this has been accompanied by extensive immigration from Brazil, whose government is reportedly notably sympathetic to Angola's.

Another group to return in numbers are the Cubans: Cuba was a notable supporter of the new Angolan state (run by the socialist MPLA) in its early years, which were characterised both by the war with the South Africa-backed-UNITA (Cuban military support was vital in the State's success in the 1988 battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest land battle in Africa since World War II), and with the attempted extension of the State, in which Cuban teachers and medics were notable. There are again large numbers of Cubans working in third level education and as doctors throughout the country. Other counties contributing such 'solidarity' workers include the Czech Republic and North Korea. International non-governmental organisations, amongst them the Irish charities Concern and Trócaire, retain a presence in the country, though it is greatly diminished since the end of the war, and less reliant on expatriate staff.

From my point of view, work now begins on the difficult task of selecting and editing footage, and seeking further funding to facilitate this. The eventual output will be a short documentary; however, ideally, an interim step would be to release short selections of footage online, either via a YouTube channel or a dedicated website, or even perhaps Facebook. The aim of this would be make the material more readily available, both to any interested in Angola (about which there is a great shortage of English-language media) and in particular to those who participated in the filming and their community. Internet rollout in Angola is proceeding apace, and all of the towns I was in have cyber cafés (though connections are erratic and bandwidth is even slower than that of Ireland).

Though traditionally Angolans have been guarded in their discussion of the war and politics, there is a new openness in the country following the successful elections of last year, which themselves followed four years of stable peace. I found people everywhere very willing to talk on camera about themselves and their country, and when I needed to film in public places (such as on buses), as soon as I described the nature of the project, people embraced it. Though there are huge problems (neglect of poor communities, corruption, incompetent administration and heavy-handed state centralisation are amongst them), there is a tangible sense in the inland towns that the country is staking a claim for recognition as a modernising nation, and they largely welcomed this outsider come to document that. I will post further updates as the project progresses.

The project is in part a collaboration with the South African photographer Guy Tillim, who has photographed Kuito extensively. There is a selection of his work here. The thumbnail above is taken from his series of portraits of displaced people in Kunhinga, outside Kuito town, in 2001.

As always, correspondence is welcome to migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org.

Colin Murphy

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic of the Irish Times is Ireland’s sole Migration Correspondent. His most recent series of reports looked at the changing dimension of migration internationally (see the report below on 21/07/09, 'Irish Times on changing face of migration internationally'). In the first part of an online interview, he answers some initial questions from Migration Matters. Readers are welcome to raise further issues by emailing migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org.

Why did you start writing about migration? 

The Irish Times ran a fellowship a few years ago which gave a journalist the chance to select a project and pursue it for up to four months, filing weekly reports for the paper on a topic that was of "transnational significance" but of particular relevance to Ireland. I chose migration because it embraced so much, and I thought it could be sustained as a single theme over quite a long time. It was also a major domestic issue, and one the media had been slow to get to grips with.  

What challenges/obstacles did you face in writing about the area?

It’s a constant challenge to strike a balance between the local and the global. Migration is a big domestic story, and generally that’s why news media here have shown such interest, but it’s also one that’s being played out on the fringes of a larger drama, and cannot be fully understood without reference to the broader context.

The paper [the Irish Times] clearly recognises its importance (not to mention its potential for new types of stories), so I’ve always felt I’ve been pushing an open door in securing space. But with such an appetite for local, Irish-specific copy, the challenge has been to keep pushing the brief further and wider.  

There’s also the perennial problem of finding a balance between the diary-driven news stories and in-depth feature work. In some ways the two work symbiotically (coverage of a “diary” event might lead to a deeper treatment, which in turn informs and improves coverage of the story as it develops), but with 14 news pages or an hour-long bulletin to fill every day, news media can unwittingly overdo the coverage of events/ reports/ arguments that are of no serious value in the long run. The trick is to satisfy the demands of the news cycle in as much as possible while looking for every chance to delve deeper into a story that is, after all, more about the process than the event.

Has the Irish media done a good job covering this story?

There’s such variety and divergence in the industry that a phrase like “the media” has lost much of its analytical meaning. It depends very much on what you read, watch or listen to. In some places the coverage can be sophisticated and well informed, in others crude and sloppy. But there’s also internal variety within media organisations, and each one of us has our strengths and weaknesses. You might read a thoughtful and thorough piece on trafficking or separated children by a certain journalist in a paper that routinely mixes up terms like asylum seekers or refugees, or shows little interest in migration generally, for example. A lack of specialisation means the nuance of a topic can often be lost, or that coverage can be vulnerable to the different agendas that are in play in the sector, whether those of NGOs, politicians or government departments. We haven’t been helped by the fact that politicians tend to say very little about immigration in public.

Overall, I think media were slow to react. Newspapers and broadcast media can be flexible and fast-moving in some ways, but, by necessity, they’re also institutionally quite rigid. As a story, migration doesn’t adhere to the same patterns that apply to, say, health or education. It’s amorphous, it cuts across established specialisms, it’s a process more than an event, and there are few ready-made networks in place between the journalists and the immigrants they’re writing about. It takes time to find contacts and gain their trust, to master asylum law or to get a handle on trends, for example, and in most newsrooms time is generally in short supply. But the situation has clearly been improving in recent years. The job I’m in at the paper was, I think, a statement that this was a major issue of the day, but also an attempt to overcome some of these problems.

What was the most significant story you've covered?

We’ve had some running news stories – the controversy over the wearing of the hijab in State schools, inspection reports on asylum seeker accommodation centres, changes to immigration law, trafficking cases, reports of ongoing problems at immigration control at Dublin airport, and so on – though I think the most interesting material has looked at the lived experience of shifting trends. Some examples would be my trips to Gort in Co Galway and to then to Anápolis in central Brazil, looking first at the effects of remittances on the Brazilian town, and then, more recently, at the pressures the economic downturn was putting those who left for Ireland. Looking at the experience of other major immigrant-receiving countries (Canada, Denmark, Germany and Spain) was instructive as well, while some of our in-depth pieces – on the growth of African Pentecostalism or the life of Ireland’s first black mayor, Rotimi Adebari [see also here], for example – were useful ways of tracking the huge changes of the past 15 years.

How is the story changing? Is it becoming less important within the media - is it getting more difficult to get space in the newspaper?

I haven’t found it more difficult to find space, but there’s clearly an appetite for news and analysis of how the economic crisis is having an impact on immigrants and migration flows generally, so the focus has shifted naturally. Across the media, there’s less coverage of immigration-related material these days than there would have been last year, but that’s in large part due to the fact that economics has been the story of the past year, and everything else has been squeezed. It would be fairly natural for coverage to move into a new phase anyway – journalists can no longer get away with relying on stories that do little more than marvel at how Ireland has changed as a result of immigration – and perhaps it’s time for more sophisticated analysis of current and future challenges.

Media That Matters is an annual festival of short films that screens every June and then year round online and through distribution and broadcast. As they say, 'the festival is the premiere showcase for short films on the most important topics of the day. Local and global, online and in communities around the world, Media That Matters engages diverse audiences and inspires them to take action.

'From gay rights to global warming, the jury-selected collection represents the work of a diverse group of independent filmmakers, many of whom are under 21. The films are equally diverse in style and content, with documentaries, music videos, animations, experimental work and everything else in between. What all the films have in common is that they spark debate and action in 12 minutes or less.'

The website collects all previous films by subject: see here for those on immigration. The winner in the Immigration section this year was 'Immersion', a narrative docudrama, which can be viewed here. Read about the film here.

Last week's report on the representation of migration in the UK heritage sector has led me to a rich seam of media and archive resources dealing with migration. The 'Community Archives and Identities' blog is a site covering community heritage issues, and regularly dips into the subjects of migration, immigration and diasporas.

The researchers behind the blog are currently working on a series of studies of Black and minority ethnic community archives. As they explain:

By community archives we mean any collection of material that documents one or many aspects of a community’s heritage, collected in, by and for that community and looked after by its members. This material helps tell the story of groups of people who have often been excluded from mainstream archives, which have tended to focus on official documents and the lives of elites. In our project we will investigate the role community archives play in supporting a sense of rootedness and identity amongst members of a community, as well as what they do to raise awareness of these neglected stories in the wider public. Ultimately, we are interested in the social impact of community archives on their creators and on their publics.

Until now there has been very little concrete evidence demonstrating the potential benefits of community archives. Research that has been done has mostly focused on the social impact of museums. We aim to fill this gap by providing detailed evidence of the ways in which community archives and histories impact on the lives of those they touch.

To do this we will be working very closely over several months with the community archives that have agreed to take part in our research. Mary will be participating actively in and contributing to the work of the archives, documenting her experiences in order to build up a detailed picture of the organisation and the effect of its work that is much more than just a snapshot.

We hope that the community archives chosen will see the project as a collaborative venture with concrete benefits for themselves. Moreover, in contributing to the research we anticipate that in a small way they will be helping to secure the long-term future of the sector, by providing evidence of the value of community archives to today’s diverse society.

Today's Liveline on RTE Radio One featured a phone-in discussion on racism in Dublin, of which I caught a few moments. There seemed to be a consensus that racism was on the rise in Ireland in tandem with the recession, and that there was widespread and unjustified resentment of people who had migrated to Ireland to do jobs that Irish people didn't want to do, but now found themselves relying on social welfare. Also a feature was extensive discussion of racism targetted at English people in Ireland, and some discussion of the history of anti-Irish racism in the UK. A representative of Dublin-based advertising agency Ethnic Media was one of the participants. The usual host Joe Duffy is on holidays; Damien O'Reilly was in the chair. Listen back here.

For readers abroad, Liveline, an afternoon public phone-in show on the main radio station, is one of the most influential media spots in Ireland; under Joe Duffy and his predecessor, Marian Finucane, it has achieved an iconic status in Irish culture and has on many occasions created news through careful steering of public discussion of controversial issues. There's an overview of its history on Wikipedia.

The Irish Diaspora Studies List has alerted me to the publication of two new reports by the UK-based think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, exploring the representation of migration in the UK heritage sector and the prospects for a British museum of migration.

Working group report on the idea of a migration museum:

The Migration Museum Working Group was formed in late 2006 to discuss what more could be done to represent migration issues within the UK museum and heritage sector. It consists of people who share an interest in these issues and a passion for seeing migration more appropriately represented in cultural life in the UK.

Over more than two millennia migration has continuously shaped and reshaped the people of the British Isles. Migration is an important part of our history and of contemporary society. But while we have major museums on most other aspects of our national life, devoted to everything from war and science to transport and the media, there is no major museum of migration. It was in this context that the Migration Museum Working Group was formed in late 2006. The group's aim was to outline the case for a major Museum of Migration in the UK.

Supporting research report by Mary Stevens on the representation of migration in the UK heritage sector:

The history of migration to and from the British Isles is as old as the islands themselves. However, the common understanding of this history as passed down through the education system as well as by museums, archives and other heritage sites, has often glossed over or ignored this crucial aspect of our island story. This paper makes the case for representation of migration in the heritage sector.

The ecumenical Christian organisation Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (CTBI) has produced a collection of resources for download for use on Racial Justice Sunday, September 13, available here. The introduction to last year's Racial Justice Sunday resources explains:

Migration is a fact of life. Increasingly, every community reflects more of the diversity of humankind. At many points in the Bible this reality is celebrated in the promise of a banquet to which all the peoples of the world are invited.

There are some further resources of relevance on CTBI's Black History Month section.

The Drum Beat e-newsletter on media and development has a report on the use of mobile phones in citizen media, citing a report by MobileActive.org, which may be of interest to readers exploring the potential of new media. As they say, the report explores the dynamics of the role of mobile phones in creating and enhancing access to information and citizen-produced media. It explores trends in the use of mobile telephony with a focus on software and platforms that make content creation and broadcasting easier. It also presents an inventory of current and potential uses of mobile phones to promote citizen media and freedom of information, and presents short case studies of examples from the MobileActive.org community.

It further discusses security considerations that might impact citizen media and freedom of information. Finally, it describes possible medium-term directions for future development and donor investments. The report is available here.