Making racist comments about Travellers is still viewed as “acceptable” in Ireland and people who do so are not being pulled up by others, according to the Council of Europe’s new human rights commissioner.
Michael O’Flaherty (65), originally from Co Galway, is still unpacking boxes following his appointment to the senior post with the Strasbourg-based organisation, which he took up a week ago.
He said that while growing up his parents told him whatever he did, he should make himself “useful”. That piece of advice led him to first train as a solicitor, before leaving the legal profession to briefly become a priest in the late 1980s.
O’Flaherty said that as a teenager he was heavily influenced by several “activist” priests in school, who were involved in “heroic” work in Nigeria during the country’s civil war in the late 1960s.
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“The Catholic Church looked like a very meaningful way to be useful,” he said. “Then later on I became ordained, but a few years later I realised it wasn’t for me. There were personal things and issues I had with the church and I moved along a road which brought me more explicitly into human rights.”
After leaving the priesthood, he worked for the United Nations on the ground during the Bosnian war in the 1990s and later in Sierra Leone during a civil war around the turn of the century. He would go on to serve as chief commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and, until recently, was director of the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency.
“I’ve been in the area of international human rights for over 30 years and I’ve never seen it more challenging,” he said. “I’ve come away from most conflict zones not remembering the horrors, but remembering the extraordinary resilience of goodness in a society, despite the presence of such extraordinary evil.”
[ O’Flaherty sets out stall as European human rights commissioner term beginsOpens in new window ]
The Council of Europe, whose 46 members include EU countries, Britain, Ukraine, Turkey and others, is charged with upholding human rights. O’Flaherty said much of his focus in his new role would be on the fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.
“It’s a war on values,” he says. “This is a very deliberate war against the modern rights-based Europe.”
O’Flaherty said work to repatriate the thousands of Ukrainian children “abducted” by Russia could not be allowed to slip from the top of the international agenda. Russia has to face accountability for its actions, even if this takes decades, he said.
“If you get away with this stuff then the next tyrant, the next thug, will grab the opportunity. The massive investment in establishing the International Criminal Court was not an idle exercise,” he said.
“Look over a couple of decades and you’ll see justice was delivered for the former Yugoslavia, justice was delivered for Sierra Leone.”
Another issue O’Flaherty plans to focus on in the role is the discrimination faced by Travellers and Roma people. He said there is a “careless racism” about Travellers in Ireland that needs to be confronted.
“It’s still acceptable to express racist remarks about Travellers, you just know this from being Irish, people can get away with a racist remark about Travellers,” he said. “If you said it about Jews or people of another ethnicity you’d be called out, you’d be called a racist.”
Local authorities were, he added, failing the vulnerable minority when it came to investing in Traveller-specific housing. “When I was a kid the Magdalene laundries were functioning, the industrial schools were functioning, my family and everybody on our street we all just got by with our lives, while well aware they were there.”
In mainland Europe, O’Flaherty said, many Roma communities are pushed to the edge of society, living in “de facto ghettos” which are shunned by the rest of the town.
“When future generations look back on this generation, the way we look back on generations that tolerated slavery, they will say: ‘How could you live so comfortably, with such suffering around you?’”
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