Dissent on the ranks

Faced with a ‘closed shop’ at some Dublin taxi ranks, many foreign-national drivers view exclusionary behaviour as racism

LAST YEAR I spent a shift in a taxi with a taximan and wrote about it for this newspaper. Over 12 gruelling hours on a Saturday night, he made just over €140 and good-humouredly put up with all sorts of anarchic, drunken behaviour from passengers.

That night there was an undercurrent of racism from some customers (one woman skipped three non-Irish drivers to get into our car) and some taximen. Subsequently, there have been scandals involving taxis with green lights, supposedly indicating Irishness (these have vanished), and ongoing rumours of racially segregated ranks. Anecdotally, the most regular culprit is the rank on O’Connell Street, Dublin, which is reputed to have a closed shop of regulars and is, in my recent experience, regularly host to shouting matches and horn-beeping aggression between drivers.

Eighteen months ago, concern about public-order issues on some Dublin ranks prompted Garda moves to address the problem; specifically, according to some taximen, the rank across from the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell Street. “We do have the power to ensure a taxi rank is run in a competent manner,” a Garda spokesman said this week.

“There was an unsavoury element controlling that rank for a time,” says Jerry Brennan, the taxi branch organiser of Siptu. “The Garda did pay particular attention to that rank and the unsavoury behaviour was sorted out.”

David Franzoni, a committee member of new representative body Tiománaí Tacsaí na hÉireann, who I meet on the Gresham rank, says, “myself and a number of other drivers had meetings with gardaí to resolve a few issues around how this rank was run. The gardaí told me they’ve had no issues since.”

Franzoni stresses the issues were not about race. He lists several non-Irish colleagues who work there. They recently had a whip-around to send a Turkish colleague home for his father’s funeral, and another to help an Egyptian driver to visit his sick mother.

“I’ll admit that this is a strict rank,” says another driver, Joe. “Some might see it as a closed shop because if there’s anything wrong with your documentation, you’ll be asked off the rank. But a lot of problems are simply a result of people not queuing properly.”

Others, however, maintain that some at the Gresham rank, and to a lesser extent the ranks adjoining O’Connell Street, practise exclusionary behaviour. “The system there is designed to keep people out,” says John from Sierra Leone, who is on the rank at St Stephen’s Green. “In O’Connell Street they’ve a system where the queue is not serial and they do that to keep people out. When you go there you might queue up but the guy you’re queuing behind, he’s not necessarily the guy you’re after. When you ask who you’re after in the queue they don’t tell you and it can get very aggressive.”

There’s a term in the taxi industry called “getting last”. In the past, and up until recently at the O’Connell Street rank, a new taxi-driver would “get last” by asking who they were following if it wasn’t immediately apparent. It might have been the car in front or it could well be one of several cars circling the rank. According to Franzoni and others, many new drivers misunderstood the system and misconstrued it as racist. Furthermore, Franzoni says the rank now operates in a more straightforward way.

Yet, others say that many at the O’Connell Street rank still withhold information and are generally unfriendly. “I don’t go there anymore,” says Uche who comes from Biafra. “The person you think you’re following will deny that you’re following him.”

“I went there about four months ago and a guy said: ‘You don’t normally work here. Why are you here?’” says Pascal from Cameroon. “He told me to leave. But I didn’t, as he has no right to say that. It’s like the Mafia.”

Jerry Brennan of Siptu is reluctant to put this in a racial context. “In the past, the ‘racism’, if you can use that word, was between the Dublin fellows and the country fellows. The Dubliners stuck together. When I got into the industry in 1990, I couldn’t ‘get last’ on that rank, but then I learned the unwritten rules. The problem now is that when deregulation happened you had a massive deluge of new people and there wasn’t time to teach them these unwritten rules, and it created tension.”

THAT TENSION ISpartially about economics. All the drivers, Irish or not, talk of falling incomes and tough working conditions, against a backdrop of 14,000 taxis operating in Dublin, concerns about part-time drivers and unlicensed operators. "I do about 65 hours a week for the equivalent of social welfare," says Ali Sala from Somalia, who is at the St Stephen's Green rank. At the College Green rank, an Irishman named Chris talks about the suicides and stress-induced heart attacks of colleagues, and an older driver called Tom recalls having a knife held to his throat the previous week. "I managed to get away, but I was pretty shook up for a few days."

Although many of the non-Irish and Irish drivers have similar problems, non-Irish drivers have the additional problem of passengers skipping their cars because of the colour of their skin (this practice was unintentionally facilitated by the Taxi Regulator deciding that choosing any taxi from a rank was the customer’s prerogative). This behaviour is exacerbated by the insinuations of colleagues. David Franzoni at the O’Connell Street rank suggests that because foreign drivers are only vetted from the time they entered the country, Irish drivers are more strictly vetted and thus it’s reasonable to skip a non-Irish taxi driver: “If the first car is a non-EU national driver and a person goes past them to an Irish driver, is that racism or is that person protecting their own personal security because they know these guys haven’t been security checked?”

All the non-Irish taximen I speak to feel unwelcome at the O’Connell Street rank. Drivers there maintain they exclude only those who break the rules. Others contend that they’re generically unfriendly to newcomers, that it just so happens that many of the newcomers are non-Irish. “I don’t feel entirely comfortable on that rank myself,” says an Irish veteran of two decades.

Whatever the intention, a side effect is racial exclusion. If the Irish drivers on this rank feel misunderstood, they could try being friendlier to strangers. Evarest Chisi from Nigeria has been hearing innuendo about foreign-national drivers since 2010. “Before that, everyone was friendly,” he says. “Then I started hearing: ‘Don’t go with the non-nationals because they will rob you.’ A girl told me that one Irish driver told her she might be raped in a car with a non-Irish driver. I studied psychology. I understand why this is happening. When the recession came and there wasn’t as much work, those who couldn’t cope with the new situation started brainwashing the youth about non-Irish drivers. I don’t even call it racism. I call it recessionism.”

RANK OUTSIDER: EVAREST CHISI

I'm from Nigeria, but my family lives in Warsaw. I went there 24 years ago to study psychology and I married a Polish girl. I came here in 2005 because I read that Ireland needed psychologists. I ended up working for a security company. I've been in the taxi business since 2009.

A good friend of mine, Bernard, is an Irish taxi guy. One day I was at the top of a rank and I was talking with him when a girl and a boy came, ignored us and took the next taxi.

I took another fare and when I came back, Bernard was upset. I said, "What's wrong?" He said the other driver had come back and said, "If you weren't talking to that nigger, I wouldn't have taken the fare."

I saw it in Poland at the end of communism. You could be queuing two hours for a loaf of bread and some guy would think, if it wasn't for him I wouldn't have had to queue so long.

In Poland, the racism was more direct. Here they try to tarnish our image, telling people nonsense about us ripping people off. I don't do that. I believe in karma.