Abbas Ghadimi began working as an accountant and auditor before the 1979 Iranian revolution and the overthrow of the shah. He also began work in accountancy before he converted from Islam to the Bahá'i faith. When his boss requested he update his personal information for the company records a few years after the revolution, Ghadimi knew the time had come to leave the country.
“My boss brought me the form and said ‘you just sign here and I’ll fill out the rest’. I asked, ‘what about the religion section’ and he said ‘that’s okay, I’m going to write Muslim. If I give you the form I know you’re going to write Bahá’i and I don’t want to lose you’.”
Ghadimi explained to his boss that his Bahá'i faith did not allow him to lie and that he must be honest in the form."I never filled out the form. I just left, got in touch with someone I knew in Pakistan, put on a disguise and crossed the border."
Ghadimi was born on August 19th, 1953, the same day a military coup overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister. His father, who he describes as “an uneducated and superstitious man”, believed his newborn son’s birth had brought bad luck to the country. “He was going to throw me in the river but my granny stopped him and took me away and went into hiding.”
Despite his Muslim upbringing, Ghadimi developed an interest in the Bahá’i faith and converted in his mid-20s, just six months before the 1979 revolution in his home country.
“Religion is an individual thing and man should be in connection with God himself or herself. There shouldn’t be someone telling them how to pray. The truth of all religions are the same – Christianity, Buddhism, etc – the core is about being truthful, honest and loving your neighbour.”
Revolution in action
“Three weeks after I became a Bahá’i one of the bombs went off in the cinema and a lot of people died and suddenly the revolution was in action. Revolution is like boiling food – from the moment you heat it until it overflows there’s a period of time but during that period there was a lot of uncertainty.”
Ghadimi left Tehran in 1984. As a follower of the Bahá'i faith, he was not allowed to hold a passport in Iran and walked for a week through the desert to cross the border to Pakistan where he registered as a refugee with the United Nations. He knew his life would be in danger if he remained in Tehran.
"I was in Pakistan waiting for 14 months. I arrived in October 1984 and left in December 1985. When I left Iran my aim was to go to Africa because my youth fantasy was to help underprivileged African people."
Ghadimi was offered an interview to apply to fly to England before travelling onwards to Botswana. However, when he arrived for his visa appointment an official at the office asked him if he had considered seeking asylum in Ireland.
"At the time if you wanted to go to America or Australia or Europe, or really anywhere in the Western world, you had to have family who would sponsor you. This man told me, you don't need family to go to Ireland. He said 'you're the best candidate because you're young and you can learn English'.
“Every time I had talked about going to Africa there was all this uncertainty, it was just a fantasy. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I had good intentions. But suddenly when he said Ireland I could actually see a road and a light at the end of that road.”
The Irish government had decided, with the support of Ireland’s Bahá’i community, to offer asylum to 25 Iranian Bahá’is fleeing persecution.
“We were actually the first refugees to arrive after the Vietnamese. They called us programme refugees. In other words, the government planned it; they knew every single individual, who we were and where we were going to live.”
Welcomed
Ghadimi arrived in Ireland in December 1985 and was sent to live in Kilkenny where he was welcomed by the local Bahá’i community. He immediately felt at home and on his third day there told a Bahá’i friend; “I’m going to be buried in this town.”
"I felt I was home. I actually never felt that way about any other place in Ireland. I went to Sligo, Donegal, I went abroad to Amsterdam, but wherever I went, I never felt the same way I feel about Kilkenny."
Unable to work as an accountant in his new home, Ghadimi found a job shovelling manure on a local fruit and vegetable farm. He did a training course to set up his own business and began saving small amounts of money from his social welfare payments. Eventually he saved enough to get a loan and bought a van and started selling fruit and vegetables from door to door. A year later he opened a health food store.
He met a wholesaler who questioned whether a recently arrived Iranian refugee could run a successful business. “He said ‘you need to have good English, a knowledge of health food and a budget and you have none of these’. I said: ‘Okay, I have to prove that I can open the shop and be successful’.
Gradually learned
“Initially I didn’t know the difference between barley and oats but I gradually learned. When you teach me something you don’t need to teach me a second time. I just learn and follow. I then spoke to one of the wholesalers who said he knew a school of homeopathy was opening and I was in the first year of students at the school. I studied homeopathy for four years and then took one further year of postgraduate study.”
Ghadimi still runs a health food store, Food for Life, and lives in Callan, Co Kilkenny, with his Irish wife Carmel Rose. His 28-year-old daughter Emily is currently sitting the New York bar exam while his younger daughter Ruth is studying catering in Dublin.
When Ghadimi arrived in Ireland more than three decades ago there were few migrants here. “Ireland was in a way very excluded from the rest of the world. Things have changed in the past 30 years and technology has become so advanced. But at the same time, the Irish haven’t lost their warm, embracing, caring nature.”
Irish people don’t realise how lucky they are to live in a safe, democratic nation, he says. “You can never appreciate what you have. The health service in this country is second to none. If you break your leg you go to hospital and they don’t ask you to pay till later. When my mum had an accident they didn’t even let her in the hospital till she had lodged the money . . . What’s more, we are able to sit here in Ireland and nobody is dropping a bomb on our heads.”
While Ghadimi loves his life in Ireland, he will always consider himself Persian and is proud to see his two daughters speak with pride of their family’s roots. “I’m Persian,” he says. “I’ll always be Persian.”
