'How could I bring my children back to a place where they would not be safe?'

Nkechi Okolie and her three children were summoned to Castleblayney Garda station and deported to Nigeria without even being allowed to pack. Kathy Sheridan hears the impact this has had on the family and on the town

From the Vanguard news website, Lagos, Nigeria, March 16th, 2005: "No fewer than 35 Nigerians were yesterday repatriated from Dublin, Ireland, for immigration-related offences. The deportees were brought into the country in a chartered flight which touched down at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport (MMIA), Ikeja, Lagos at exactly 7am.

"On arrival, the deportees were received by police and immigration personnel, after which they were transferred to Alagbon [ Prison]. The deportees would not volunteer any information on the cause of their deportation, as they were barred from entertaining questions."

Nkechi Okolie and her three children, Ike (15), Chidinima (10) and Chukka (six), were among them. Exhausted and ill from an ordeal that had begun 15 hours earlier in Castleblayney Garda station, Co Monaghan, Nkechi had other questions on her mind as they embarked on the 90-minute journey to Alagbon. Chidinima and Chukka were already wilting in the tropical heat. Two of their suitcases had been stolen. She would have to "negotiate" her family's release from Alagbon.

At Alagbon, a deportee's chances of release appear to depend on a payment calculated on the amount of luggage, number of children they bring in, etc. The initial sum demanded of Nkechi was so swingeing she had to explain that in Ireland, asylum seekers are not allowed to work and therefore she had no money; that for most of that time, she had barely managed to survive as a lone parent, rearing a family and paying rent on the single parent's and children's allowances.

Six hours later, with nothing to eat or drink all day, a "payment" of £350 (€505) was finally accepted - most of the money that had been pressed into her hand by distressed friends and neighbours at Castleblayney Garda station.

After leaving Alagbon Prison, her sister took them to stay with a friend in a shanty town, where she and her three children now occupy a room in a three-bedroom apartment. The electricity works for a few hours every day and the smaller children, unaccustomed to the heat, have come out in rashes and stay indoors. The family is living hand to mouth.

When Nkechi, a devout Christian, speaks to The Irish Times this week, she is too frightened to say where they are but is adamant that she cannot return to Kano, the state she fled. "It is a Muslim area . . . There were many riots, three or four thousand people were killed, children were slaughtered. Paid hoodlums can do what they like."

The church and school in which she and her husband were involved in Kano were burned down and church leaders were kidnapped and beheaded, she told friends. Her small daughter was under imminent threat of cliterodectomy (female circumcision, something this family has good reason to fear). They were rescued by a missionary order, which got them to a port and on to a ship.

"Why would they do that if they did not think we were in danger?" she asks incredulously. She has worked at a senior level in financial services and holds a Nigerian master's degree. After a few months studying for a community development degree in Dundalk IT, she was deemed too advanced for the course and was moved up to master's level. But despite all this, her story, clearly, was not believed by the Irish immigration authorities. Why?

"They relied on what they read on the [ official Nigerian] website," she says. "They said I should have relocated to another part of Nigeria. But Nigeria is a very tribal country. To get a job, you need to know tribal people, and to do that you must go back and establish yourself in your own state. But if I do that, my daughter will be circumcised. As for relocating, there are riots, chaos and violence all over the country so it is not just a simple case of moving."

A six-year-old girl in the neighbourhood where she is staying was raped by a 61-year-old man on Wednesday night, she adds. The girl is in hospital; the man is free: "Of course, nothing will be done."

LAST YEAR, LAGOS was placed 127th on the list of 130 of the world's worst capital cities to live in, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, based on chaos, hardship and violence. The media rights body, Reporters without Borders, names Nigeria as one of the most dangerous countries in Africa for journalists, citing high levels of violence.

This is the country to which the destitute Nkechi Okolie and her three children were deported back to after more than three years of peace, stability and remarkably successful integration in an Irish town.

The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, declined to be interviewed for this article.

The impact the Okolie family had on Castleblayney, with a population of around 4,000, crossed party and religious lines. Nkechi, described as a "beautiful, intelligent, gracious woman, who displayed great faith in God", by the Rev Nancy Cubitt of First Castleblayney Presbyterian Church, had got involved in several voluntary organisations. Joe Bishop, a neighbour who has a milk round and shop, says: "On the wettest morning in winter, she'd be full of the joys of spring. She'd do your heart good."

Ike, who came first in his class in the Junior Cert, is spoken of with something akin to awe by his classmates. "He sounds like something you'd make up in your head but this was real," says Loretta Hughes. The two younger siblings have many friends and are, in the words of a neighbour, "the best-mannered children you'd ever see".

Education was the family's driving force. "If you went to their home between five and seven any evening, they would all be there at their books", says Martin Cadden, a neighbour. "Ike was hungry to learn, a solid student and got huge support at home," says Gerry Hand, principal of Castleblayney College. "He wanted to be a civil engineer - he was interested in aircraft," says a schoolmate, Fiachra Duffy (15), still pale with distress.

This apparent ease of transition had not occurred without trauma. When they arrived at the Castleblayney reception centre, they were five - father, mother and three children. But the father who, according to one friend, had been badly burnt in a fire in the school where he taught in Nigeria, seemed unable to cope with life in the reception centre and left. Nkechi was left alone with three children and, soon after, decided to move out.

"She didn't think it was the right place to bring up a family. She didn't want to live off the system and she wanted to provide for herself," a friend of Ike's says of Nkechi. They believe this was one of the reasons why the family was deported; "they were seen to break the rules," says Duffy.

CASTLEBLAYNEY PEOPLE RETURN repeatedly to this point; that the Okolies were not "the kind to live off the system . . . they were different". Different to what? "Nigerians have a bad reputation and a lot of it deserved. The stereotype is of people who are spongers and wasters - but the Okolies are different." This week, several communities around Ireland were making the same claim - though, notably, about other families.

None of it was enough to save the Okolies once the immigration authorities finally decided to act. As Cavan-Monaghan Fine Gael TD Seymour Crawford points out, it took more than two years for a decision to be made.

The end was swift and painful. A deportation date, April 7th, appears to have been hinted at, at least, by officials. Friends, who heard this on March 8th, thought they had a month to act. In fact, they had six days. Nkechi, says a friend, Mary McSkeane, became fearful. "She kept saying: 'I cannot bring my children back to that place.' She was so frightened, particularly about female genital mutilation." Nonetheless, when Nkechi was ordered to appear at Castleblayney Garda station at 4pm on Monday, March 14th, they thought it was just to "sign in . . . like someone on bail, even though she had done nothing wrong". Ike signed out of school at lunchtime to be there for his siblings when they came home.

But when Nkechi turned up at the Garda station, she was told immigration officers were on the way from Dublin. When they arrived, they said they needed to see the whole family but, recalls Rev Cubitt, "this didn't necessarily mean anything was going to happen".

McSkeane, who had taken the children to McDonald's in Monaghan for a treat, got a call half-way through the meal, during which an immigration officer ordered her to "bring the children back here immediately". Not knowing what was happening, they drove back to the station, where the car door was opened by a garda. "The whole family went into a small office with the children officials for a few silent eerie moments," recalls Rev Cubitt. When the door opened, Chidinima was crying. Ike just sat and stared, and began to phone his friends. Nkechi had become extremely distressed.

The station filled with friends and their children, shocked and crying. A garda asked for two volunteers to go to the Okolie house and pack some belongings. McSkeane and two other women went, watched by a garda and an immigration officer, as they pulled out the Okolies' personal belongings and tried to assess what might be important to a woman and three children who would not be back. "I don't know why, if the garda and the immigration officer could have been there with us, they couldn't have allowed Nkechi back to pack her belongings," says McSkeane.

AT THE GARDA station, people had come to realise that the only way they could help was to provide money. Alison Greer travelled to the Border to exchange the money for sterling. One of the local gardaí - whom everyone agrees could not have been more courteous - lent his mobile to Ike. Meanwhile, Nkechi had become ill and asked for a doctor.

She was, she tells The Irish Times, at "breakdown point . . ."; in her desperation, she had swallowed "a nail cutter" [ scissors]. "How could I bring my children back to a place where they would not be safe?" Her reasoning, says a friend, was that if she died, at least her children would be safe.

A doctor was summoned who, Nkechi claims, told her his "hands were tied". At 8.40pm, they were loaded into a blue van, the children still in their school uniforms. The doors were locked and they were taken to Dublin, leaving wake-like scenes. En route, says Nkechi, she had severe diarrhoea, but was forced to soil herself repeatedly because they were not allowed a toilet stop.

At Dublin airport, a doctor gave her tablets but once on the plane, she claims that her blood pressure dropped to such dangerous levels that she was put on a drip. "They said they would try and get a doctor to take over when we landed in Lagos but there was no doctor. We were taken straight to the detention centre."

Back in Castleblayney College, Ike's text messages had alerted his friends. A classmate, Killian McNally, recalls that the teachers and the girls were crying; big boys had tears in their eyes. Duffy and others asked for a prayer service. "We decided that a Rosary would be a bit morbid so we had a candle and Mr Hand [ the principal] got a picture of Ike from the show [ the transition year performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs] and we said a decade of the Rosary. The music teacher gave us a CD with soft music and we had a minute's silence."

An emotional 120-strong public meeting on Thursday in Castleblayney College included at least a dozen of Nkechi's close neighbours, teachers and religious from schools and churches, and a cross-section of local politicians, as well as Deputy Crawford. As speakers described the family, there were tears and nods of recognition around the hall.

The attendance included representatives of the Monaghan Immigrant Support Group as well as a handful of asylum seekers from St Patrick's reception centre in Monaghan. Two African women pleaded for "a second chance", to be allowed the dignity to work and "to make ourselves useful to this country". "Thank you for your support and for your support for sister Nkechi. Although our own families are not here," said one woman, her voice breaking, "we have you as our families, by the grace of God, on whom we can count."

Nkechi Okolie has heard of the Ministerial U-turn regarding one of her fellow deportees, Olukunle Elukanlo. "That is very good for him but for me, it seems so unfair. My boy did so well in his Junior Cert . . . Why should he be deprived of this prospect? Each of my children has prospects. What makes this different?"