Fintan Drury: Ireland has failed Europe’s refugees once again

Those who govern this small Republic are failing us. Worse, the majority of those whom we elected to the Opposition in order to keep government honest are failing us too. The Christian churches, which have lost whatever moral high ground they had been granted by previous generations, have not been sufficiently vocal as the great humanitarian crisis that envelops Europe now has unfolded.

Most worryingly, because there are no longer daily reports of migrants drowning in the Med or the Aegean, as a people we have, in large measure, failed to appreciate that the issue is no less critical for the millions fleeing conflict. We have, seemingly, lost our voice, our anger, our capacity to demand of politicians that they introduce a moral compass to their work on our behalf.

We have a President who, as his two most immediate predecessors had done on other issues of conscience, has stretched the confines of the political straitjacket conferred by residency of the Áras and spoken out about the migrant people and Europe’s responsibilities.

We have a former European commissioner who has, of recent years, turned his motivational, diplomatic and oratorical skills to those same obligations and we have three elected representatives of Dáil Éireann – all of the left – who have visited camps and met migrants better to inform themselves of the situation. Three!

Numbers have some relevance. There are millions of refugees in Europe, an estimated 70,000 of whom are unaccompanied minors. Imagine almost filling Croke Park next Saturday with just those kids under 16 who are alone in camps in places like Germany, Lebanon, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Imagine children under 16 whom you know – perhaps your own – spending months lost and alone in makeshift camps. Then think about Ireland.

We pledged to accept 4,000 refugees with particular emphasis on families and unaccompanied minors. The quantum was and is modest but, arguably, sensible given the work outstanding on direct provision. The focus on “stray” minors was laudable. To date, a year since the pledge was made, the official figure is that just over 300 of the 4,000 have been received, one of whom is an unaccompanied minor. One!

The recent UN meeting on migrants in New York was the backdrop for the Tánaiste and the Minister for Foreign Affairs to “contextualise” Ireland’s shameful performance. Extraordinarily, despite the clear attempt to manipulate the facts in order to deflect blame, the Opposition – vocal on about every other matter of even the slightest consequence – uttered not a word of complaint. There was no row on radio or television, no angry political exchanges, nor was there widespread media analysis of what the Government’s failure said about us as a people.

My late mother, the daughter of a 1930s government minister, often bemoaned what she believed to have been an almost “see no evil, hear no evil” attitude taken by official Ireland during the second World War. Throughout her life she carried a sense of regret, if not shame, that people had not appreciated the extent of the horror being inflicted on their fellow humans across Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Our world’s a vastly different place. The failure of the majority of our politicians to engage meaningfully in Europe’s humanitarian crisis of today cannot be excused. Social media and its more traditional if uncomfortable bedfellow – including some newspapers like this one – bring us right to the heart of its reality, yet our political “leaders” rarely become energised by it. There is no doubting its complexity.

There is no doubting our domestic challenges. There is no doubting that, for all the public’s outpouring of concern when the media is full of graphic images of war or refugees, human nature can quickly relegate the issue to “not pressing”. The politicians’ excuse is that they feel that pulse and behave accordingly.

This analysis may be simplistic, but if it is even in part correct, then it betrays a fault line across the body of people we have chosen to represent us in the Oireachtas. The citizens of any democracy depend on whom they elect to be capable of giving them leadership. Within the political class of 2016, the disinterest in an issue which is of such scale, such importance and such immediate and long-term relevance is staggering. It is proof of an almost complete dearth of political leadership.

It is not just about those who have managed to escape war, most particularly in Syria; the political leadership we are entitled to expect should, too, be addressing the plight of those who remain in deep peril. In the past week, a relentless bombing of Aleppo by Russian military, using flame-throwing weapons that experts described as "one step short of nuclear" in their capacity to destroy, has received no political comment here.

This was within days of an attack on an aid convoy which the evidence suggests had been carried out by the Russian air force. A number of nations, including the usual suspects, have meddled in this conflict, but these actions by Russia should have drawn comment. What did the Minister of Foreign Affairs do or say and how did the Opposition spokespersons react to the government's disinterest?

The increasingly loud beat of the right-wing drum in Europe – Sarkozy, Orban, May – and the travails of those who have fought against it – Merkel, Hollande – may not presage a threat to the largely benign period of democracy the continent has enjoyed, but we are destined for a period of great uncertainty. We may be small and we may be on the fringes but there is a migrant strain to our DNA that demands we find our courage and our voice. Those less fortunate might expect that we would. Should we fail to do so, future generations will wonder why.

Fintan Drury is chief executive of Platinum One, a sports management business. He is a former RTÉ journalist and public relations adviser