Clodagh Finn: We need a Miss Mary of the camps now

When food scarcities became more acute, she asked laboratories to analyse the vitamin content of grape juice. She wanted to bottle it so that it might bolster the health not only of refugees but the French population who lost up to 20% of their body weight during World War ll.

In the end, the project did not come off but there were constant efforts to improve the health and conditions of those in camps in Spain and France in the late 1930s and 1940s. The children traumatised by bombing during the Spanish Civil War were among the first in Europe to be introduced to art therapy, for instance.

Several letters survive showing how Mary Elmes sought out vacant buildings, negotiated leases and turned them into refuges for the hundreds of thousands displaced by war.

I thought of Mary this week because the anniversary of her death, in 2002, fell on Saturday and also March is women’s history month. But more than that, I thought how much we need a person with a plan and an understanding of the needs of asylum-seekers in government.

It is actually obscene to think that the fanfare and spectacle of tomorrow’s St Patrick’s Day parade will take place a few kilometres away from a miserable encampment — tent city is too grand a name for it — of some 200 abandoned people.

Abandoned, that is, by government. Because, as in Mary Elmes’ time, charities have tried to fill the gaping hole left by the lack of joined-up thinking in official Ireland.

How is it that it falls to medical charity, Safetynet Primary Care, to point out the urgent need for emergency shelter for the estimated 200 people camping without access to basic facilities on Mount Street near the International Protection Office?

CEO Dr Fiona O’Reilly said they found isolated cases of scabies, respiratory ailments and other health conditions that would be exacerbated by such poor living conditions.

To be fair, there have been many calls from politicians too, most recently from Fianna Fáil TD Jim O’Callaghan who says he has written to Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman asking him to identify another more suitable outdoor location.

When asked, on the Six One News on RTÉ on Thursday, if he had identified any suitable alternative location in his constituency he said he had not.

And there’s the rub. Is it not time for elected politicians to get more involved and come up with a plan for asylum seekers that doesn’t just depend on one government department? 

The displacement of people is — and will remain — the defining issue of the 21st century, yet there is no sense of collective urgency or the kind of cross-party planning that is sorely needed.

Some 1,260 asylum-seekers have no shelter this St Patrick’s Day. To put the challenge of housing them into context, the number of homeless people in Ireland topped 13,500 in January.

The failure to deal with the latter explains the difficulty in meeting our international obligation to house those fleeing war and conflict, but the solution to both is the same — treat them as the national crises (and scandals) that they are.

Lack of imagination

The theme for this St Patrick’s Day is spréach, which translates as ‘spark’. If only we could nurture the spark so that it ignites some kind of collective action from a government that has consigned human beings to tents on a city street.

That brings me back to Mary Elmes and the kind of action she and her colleagues took when the population of south-west France doubled overnight in 1939 with the influx of 500,000 refugees from the Spanish Civil War.

Some 25 different organisations came together to try to help the refugees. With her close colleague, nurse Dorothy Morris, Mary Elmes often discussed plans on the balcony of the flat they shared at 30 Avenue des Baléares in Perpignan.

It provided sanctuary from the relentless demands of the long days travelling from camp to camp in the foothills of the Pyrenees. But, as Dorothy Morris’s biographer Mark Derby observed, it was also a place of planning. “I like to think of them there, in the warm, fragrant Mediterranean evenings, talking about saving the world, not in the vague, idealistic, theoretical way most people do. I imagine they talked about saving the world in a totally pragmatic, costed and realistic way — ‘How are we going to save the world tomorrow?’”

And here’s what Mary Elmes, head of the Quaker delegation in Perpignan, southwest France, achieved in the latter half of 1940.

She and her team helped several thousand people in different camps. In one of them, Argelès, Mary organised a school for 2,000 children, set up a library with 4,000 books, established a maternity facility in one of the barracks, distributed clothes, blankets, orthopaedic instruments, reading glasses and hernia belts, established classes for adults, set up sewing and carpentry workshops, distributed food and milk, and set up a hospital, equipping it with medicine and instruments.

To give children respite from the camps — quickly established as they were, conditions were appalling — she set up a series of care centres for children along the coast.
In March 1941, after setting up one such children’s colony, as they were called, a local paper sent along a journalist, Théo Duret, to observe the daily routine. He wrote an article full of enthusiasm for the premises, with its brightly painted walls, nourishing food and happy atmosphere.

Those centres later played a life-saving role when they became safe houses for Jewish children who were threatened with deportation.

If refugees were suffering, so too was the local population. During the war, Mary Elmes and her colleagues at the American Friends Service Committee provided school snacks or a midday meal for more than 84,000 children in the south of France.

Contrast that with what the government has done in the three months since some 200 asylum-seekers started to pitch tents on Mount Street in Dublin. Nothing.

In an era when it’s possible to build a plumbed and insulated log cabin in less than a week, that beggars belief.

We don’t really need Mary Elmes to tell us that we can do so much better than that.