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.