New to the Parish: One family’s flight from Syria to a Cork bedsit

It was a cold November day when Qayss Ramli and his 16-year-old son crammed into the boat with men, women and children desperate to reach the relative sanctuary of the EU. It took five hours for the small rubber dinghy to reach Greece.

As soon as the Greek coast appeared on the horizon, the driver slashed a hole in the boat. "It's always like this; you have to destroy the boat and make it sink," says Ramli with a sigh. "If the boat's okay they will send you back to Turkey. So the police came and saved us."

Ramli’s train of thought is interrupted by his three-year-old daughter. Meral crawls into his lap and hands him the drawing she has been quietly working on in the corner. As he continues speaking, his youngest daughter wraps her arms around his neck and whispers in his ear.

Meral did not accompany her father on the journey across the Mediterranean. She and her siblings left Syria with their mother two months after his departure and waited in Turkey while he travelled through Europe.

Ramli left his home in the Khan al Shih refugee camp in Damascus in 2013. He was one of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees living in the country before the conflict broke out. Even though his grandparents arrived in Syria nearly 70 years ago, Qayss is still considered Palestinian. He carries a Syrian travel document but not a Syrian passport.

The Syrian conflict has divided the Palestinian community, he says through a translator. Even though Ramli speaks basic English, he feels more comfortable sharing his story through Arabic. “Half of them are with the regime and some are with the rebels. The problem is that every side considers you a betrayer if you don’t join them.”

Ramli decided to cross the border illegally into Turkey with his eldest son. He left behind four children: a 14-year-old daughter from a previous relationship and two girls and a boy with his wife. Soon after he left, the family’s home was hit by a rocket.

“The rocket hit the second floor while my wife was alone with the children. The explosion was so strong it blew out the doors in the building. My children panicked and peed in their clothes. Thank God no one was injured.”

“It was indescribable, absolutely horrible, thinking about what had happened. They followed me to Turkey two months later.”

Dangerous sea travel

Meanwhile, Ramli was making arrangements to travel to Greece with his son. He paid a smuggler $3,000 for passage for the two of them in a boat across the Mediterranean. He knew about the dangers of travelling by sea but says he had no other choice.

"They put 35 of us in a van from Istanbul to Izmir," he remembers. "We were standing on our feet for 12 hours. There were old men and women, girls and boys."

When they reached the coast, he says, the smugglers tried to force the group on to a boat despite the stormy conditions. “They couldn’t even hold the boat still while we climbed in. We said, ‘How can we get into their boat when you can’t even stop it from rocking?’ ”

The second time the group tried to make the journey across the water, the boat’s motor didn’t work. “They told us we had to spend the night in the forest until they fixed the boat. It was November, very cold and we had no food. Thankfully the next day the sea was okay.”

Ramli and his son were exhausted when they arrived in Greece, but they had to keep moving. “People told me to go by land and walk from Greece through Europe, but I was afraid for my son because he might not be able to walk the distance in the cold weather.” He decided to leave his son in the Greek refugee camp, travel ahead and send for him later.

“There was no other option. I had to do what was best for my family. It was the only choice, even if it was a bad choice.”

He paid $7,000 for a fake Italian ID and booked a flight to Austria. There a contact arranged for him to fly to Ireland. He declared his Palestinian nationality to passport officials in Dublin Airport and was sent to a direct provision centre in Dublin and later transferred to Cork.

“It took about nine months to get my residency card. While I was waiting, my son was in Greece, three of my children were in Turkey with my wife, and my daughter was still in Syria.”

Ramli arranged for his daughter to join the rest of the family in Turkey and applied for family reunification when he received his Stamp 4 visa in early 2015. His family finally arrived in Cork in November 2015.

“Some people told me, ‘When you get to Europe it will feel like heaven.’ It didn’t feel like heaven until my family arrived.”

Settling into life in Ireland has not been easy. The family of seven currently live in a one-bedroom apartment in Cork city.

“We are seven people living with one bedroom because nobody will rent us a place to live on rent allowance. Even the landlords who accept rent allowance, as soon as they hear we have five kids they change their minds.”

“The kids are very happy in their schools, but to be with seven people in the same room is very difficult.”

Since the New Year's Eve attacks on women in Cologne, he has tried to avoid mentioning to people that he came to Ireland from Syria "I'm afraid of what they'll think of me after what happened in Germany. I say I'm Palestinian and that's true."

Even though his roots are in Palestine, he is deeply saddened by the destruction he witnessed in Syria. He often feels guilty that his immediate family were able to get out of the country while cousins back home were killed by rockets. “I’m not very optimistic that the situation will get better. Of course I’d like to go back but I’m not optimistic. It will never be like before.”

Ramli’s dream is that his children will one day become Irish citizens. “I hope my children can get Irish passports because then they would become the first people in my family since 1948 to own a passport.”

• We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland in the past five years. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com. @newtotheparish