Migrant Sunday

From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters, cp

Sunday, 17th January 2016

 Every year I have been most enthusiastic about the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. We Irish have been migrants ourselves all down the years and migrants can be such an enrichment to our country so I felt we in our turn should do all we can to welcome migrants and refugees. There can be no doubting the desperation of these people who risk their lives trying to reach Europe. Around 3,000 were drowned in the Mediterranean this last year. Many more were met with rejection and miles of razor wire.

But after a year of terrorist attacks, I can see why people think we’re naïve in welcoming large numbers of migrants especially when we have such a problem trying to provide for our own homeless and because asylum seekers are already spending so many years in Direct Provision Centres (often described as prisons!). And now, there’s the urgent need to provide for those who lost everything in the recent floods.

Fergal Keane has seen first hand the devastation caused by war and conflict in many parts of the world but says he’s more worried beginning this New Year than he’s ever been before. The Syrian conflict will probably grind on irrespective of peace talks. Assad, he feels, has every reason to believe he can hold on to power.  And we will still face the threat of terrorist attacks even if Isis is defeated. But above all such considerations, it’s the mood of our times that is most troubling. The defining feature of our age is fear and the rise of intolerance. And prejudice is a way of refusing to engage with “a maddeningly complex world.”

I feel he’s right about that. We can recognise it in our own hearts. It is such a complex world and it’s so hard to know which voices to listen to when bombarded with propaganda from all sides. But we mustn’t let fear or prejudice turn us into unfeeling robots concerned only for our own. We mustn’t let what happened in Germany on New Year’s Eve give us a reason to condemn all refugees. Or the asylum seeker who is bringing the state to court because he didn’t like the food provided at the Viking House Centre in Waterford! When overwhelmed by fear or prejudice we can be glad to focus on what confirms our fears. But you know well you’ll find people like that everywhere.

                Certainly, charity begins at home but it doesn’t end there.