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Facing ‘return’ to an unknown world

Laois Nationalist, August 2007

The plight of the Agbonlahor family continues. Colin Murphy speaks to a distraught mother and explains why they have fallen through the cracks of the system

“Mummy, what is Africa?” six-year-old Melissa Agbonlahor asked her mother recently. “In my class they were telling me, ‘you are going to Africa’.”

Melissa has never been to Africa, but her classmates in Killarney were right. All going to plan in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Melissa, her twin brother, Great, who is autistic, and their mother, Olivia, will be deported to Nigeria, a country the twins have never seen, in August.

I spoke to Olivia Agbonlahor on the telephone one night recently. She was speaking from the room she shares with her two children in a hostel for asylum seekers in Killarney. It was 10.30pm, and I had difficulty hearing her because of the background noise: a constant, high-pitched screaming. This was Great.

“He doesn’t know how to play with other kids,” Olivia said. “He’s always on his own. He doesn’t want other children to come near him, and if they come near him, he might hit them.”

When Olivia goes to Sunday mass, Great is always “screaming and running up to the altar”.
When she goes out, she has to keep an eagle eye on him. “I can’t associate with anybody because of him. But what can I do, I still love him, he’s my baby.”

Olivia’s deportation will be the end result of a long, complicated and exhausting legal process. “For the past four and a half years I have been fighting this case. I cannot withstand the emotional trauma any more,” she said.

She recently dropped her second legal challenge to her deportation. Her solicitor advised that it could prolong her stay in Ireland further, but was unlikely to succeed, and Olivia decided she couldn’t face a further battle.

Olivia’s solicitor, Kevin Brophy, said he “never felt that her case was very strong legally.

“I always felt that it was going to come down to a humanitarian decision on the part of the Minister.”

He has written to the new Minister for Justice, Brian Lenihan, asking that he revoke the deportation order issued by his predecessor, Michael McDowell. A spokesperson for the Department has said the Minister saw “no basis” for doing so.

Olivia’s case was peculiar. She applied for asylum in Ireland in 2002 citing fear of persecution in Italy, where she had been living, legally, with her husband, a Nigerian journalist, Martins Agbonlahor. He had done investigative work on Nigerian gangs in Italy, and this lead to death threats against the family. These were documented by the Italian police, according to Brophy. There was a “family decision” that Olivia should leave with the children, and she came to Ireland; Martins stayed behind to continue his work.

But there is no provision to grant asylum from another EU country and so Olivia was refused asylum here. In the meantime, having spent an extended period outside Italy, she lost her right to residence there, even though her husband was still legally resident.

At this stage, Olivia was presented with three options by the Department of Justice, as is standard in asylum cases: she could voluntarily repatriate herself to Nigeria; she could apply directly to the Minister for permission to stay in Ireland; or she could ignore these and await deportation.

By then, Great had been diagnosed with a behavioural disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). (He was subsequently diagnosed with a more severe disability, autism.) So Olivia applied to the Minister for Justice for leave to remain in Ireland on “humanitarian” grounds, saying both Great and Melissa would be treated as outcasts and “voodoo” children in Nigeria because of his disability.

Her account is backed up by medical research. A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that 82 per cent of people in Nigeria “would not tolerate even basic social contacts with a mentally ill person” and that mental illness was commonly believed to be caused by “possession by evil spirits”.

Olivia’s appeal to the Minister was refused, and sought a judicial review of that decision in the High Court. Judge Kevin Feeney was sympathetic in tone, but strict in his decision. He found that the law in this regard was “an austere one”: the lack of treatment in Nigeria would need to “result in the likely death” of Great for it to be a sufficiently serious ground for the High Court to overturn the Minister’s decision to deport.

This leaves the Agbonlahors in a peculiar and traumatic position. Olivia no longer has the option to voluntarily repatriate to Nigeria. If she is deported, her passport will be stamped accordingly and, under EU immigration provisions, she will not be entitled to re-enter any European country. So why doesn’t she leave Ireland for Italy, where her husband is legally resident and on citizenship track?

According to Kevin Brophy, the State’s counsel in the High Court challenge queried why Martins hadn’t applied for family reunification in Italy. But, under Italian immigration law, for Martins to apply for family reunification, his family have to have residence status in the country from which they are seeking to enter Italy. So Martins can’t apply to be reunited with his family while they are in Ireland; but once Olivia has been deported to Nigeria, she will no longer be allowed to enter Italy. The family have fallen between the cracks of the European asylum and immigration system.

Olivia said the whole ordeal has been “very challenging” and is starting to take its toll on her. But she has been “overwhelmed” by “the support I have received from the people of Ireland”. “I never expected it. If people hadn’t given me this support, I wouldn’t have withstood this all this time.”

Facing the prospect of deportation, she said she was afraid of what faced them as a family because of Great’s autism. Nigerian society is more social, she said, and it is therefore more difficult to separate or isolate a child from his peers.

“Other people will feel threatened to live near or around him. They’ll think maybe he’s possessed by voodoo. The only treatment is to send him to a psychiatric home where there is no treatment, they just wait for him to die.”

But she has two children, and she said she worries about the effect the ordeal has had on Melissa.

“She’s brilliant at school. In all her books, the teachers say “excellent”. But it’s really difficult because all the attention is on Great. She asks me, ‘Mummy, do you love me?’ I tell her of course. She’s a good kid.

“She always asks me if Daddy is coming to be with us. I say at this time it’s not possible. Daddy doesn’t have the right to be here. But very soon he’ll be coming.”

This article was produced with the assistance of the Forum on Migration and Communications.