People of 2016: Elaine Mernagh, Calais volunteer. ‘I saw kids beaten with batons’

When Elaine Mernagh cofounded Cork Refugee Solidarity in August 2015, the group intended to drive one van full of tents and blankets to help refugees in Calais.

Then the death by drowning of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi elicited a burst of public generosity, and Cork Refugee Solidarity received more than €150,000 in donations. They left Ireland in a convoy of articulated lorries filled with aid, and a retinue of 53 volunteers, including builders, architects, doctors and nurses.

“On the first day in the Jungle, I knew that was where I was supposed to be,” says Mernagh (38), a teacher of adult education training courses. “Leaving was the hardest part for me. Before I even went home I had booked my return flight for two weeks later. At one point I was commuting to France three days every week.”

It’s about knowing how to put oneself in someone else’s shoes, Mernagh explains. “If I arrived in a foreign country, apart from food and shelter, I’d want to hear someone say: ‘I’m happy that you’re safe. Forget the governments that persecuted you during your journey. The regular Joe Soap is happy that you’re here.’”

French authorities shut down the Calais camp on October 24th. Mernagh now visits the friends she made there in France and Britain.

When the southern part of the Jungle was demolished in March, a group of Iranians went on a hunger strike and sewed their lips shut. By October, Mernagh says: “Nobody tried to resist. Nobody protested. They either got on the buses or headed off in their own direction.”

Pepper-sprayed

She says she was shocked by what she sees as inhumane treatment by the French.

“I’ve met children walking barefoot back into that camp because police had caught them trying to get onto a truck and took the shoes off them. I saw kids who were pepper-sprayed directly into their faces, whose backs were bruised because they were beaten with batons.”

Not all French police are bad, Mernagh hastens to add. “Wassim, a Syrian friend, told me about a French police officer who was crying with him as he took him out of a truck. Wassim begged the policeman to let him try to get to England, and the policeman couldn’t.”

Mernagh says she no longer listens passively if she hears someone make racist or xenophobic comments.

“Two years ago, I didn’t even know a person of the Muslim faith. I didn’t know how to find Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sudan or Syria on a map . . . If you had asked me a year ago, would you go to Syria, I would have said no. But when the war ends, so many of my friends want to go back. I want to go back with them, for a visit.”

Mernagh would like to reassure fearful Europeans who have not had direct contact with migrants. "I have never, ever met lovelier people. Irish people are very welcoming, but this was on a different level. We were trying to welcome them to Europe, and they were welcoming us into the most awful camp. We could do with more of that spirit in Ireland, because we are losing a lot of our grass roots and céad míle fáilte."

Sadly, Mernagh says, she does not expect the future to be any better. The Calais Jungle peaked at 10,000 inhabitants, a tiny portion of the millions of migrants in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Greece and Turkey.

“Like the Palestinian people who were born and raised in camps outside their homeland, it’s going to happen again,” she predicts. “The single, strong young men can endure the journey and keep going. The families and children cannot. They sit and wait and hope that the governments will open their hearts. That’s never going to happen.”

Every excuse in the book

Mernagh attended a Dáil hearing that resulted in a commitment to bring 200 unaccompanied minors from Calais to Ireland.

"Frances Fitzgerald, our minister for equality and justice – which is so ironic – tried to find every excuse in the book not to accept them," she says. "We can intervene. We can contact the French authorities. A government can do that."

Mernagh fears “a lot of knuckle-dragging and a lot of oh, the paperwork is missing –like from the Home Office” on the part of civil servants assigned to bring the children to Ireland. But she has only praise for President Michael D Higgins. “He really wants to do the right thing. He’s an amazing man. How could you possibly say no to 200 children from a war-torn country?”

Most migrant camps in Europe are comprised predominantly of one nationality, Mernagh notes.

“In Calais there was a real community spirit. So many different nationalities ended up there, and that made it unique. They built churches and mosques. It was fascinating. Now it’s gone.”