I left EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin with burning eyes and ringing ears. The museum is located in Dublin’s docklands, in the vaults of an industrial building dating back to 1820, initially used as a bonded customs warehouse for tobacco and wine. It now houses a shopping mall. The museum underneath strikes me as a souped-up version of the corridor displays sometimes seen in airports that serve as a taster of the country you are about to enter – generally, exercises in banality. EPIC is dedicated to histories of the Irish diaspora and emigration from Ireland – clearly a fascinating subject. Unfortunately, it primarily consists of soundbytes and rapidly moving, ruthlessly edited film clips: sound and image bleeding and morphing in an infuriating fashion. Throughout the galleries, mawkish and pointless ‘interactivity’ (Guess the Outlaw!) is liberally scattered. It seems to have been designed for people with a concentration span of about three seconds and the ability to read no more than two sentences at a time. A whole room of fake ‘olde worlde’ book spines with titles by authors from Ireland and the Irish diaspora is par for the course.
EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin.
One ‘byte’ that caught me was a snippet of a sentence from the writer Edna O’Brien: ‘There must be something secretly catastrophic about a country from which so many people go, escape…’ Manifestations of this sense of catastrophe is very evident on the streets of Dublin where, around every corner, there is a plaque or monument to fallen heroes, victims, martyrs, to those massacred or starved, impoverished, imprisoned, locked out, removed, shamed or otherwise driven from homes, workplaces or homelands. It is reminiscent of Freud’s image of the unconscious, in Civilization and its Discontents, as a Rome ‘in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones’.
Outside EPIC there is a memorial to the Great Irish Famine (1845- 1849), which commemorates the forced emigration of 1,490 tenants from Strokestown Park estate in Co. Roscommon (now the site of the National Famine Museum) during the summer of 1847. The tenants were forced to walk the 167km route along the Royal Canal to Dublin, where they boarded the open deck of a packet steamer to Liverpool. From there, they travelled on some of the worst of what became known as ‘coffin ships’. One of them was the Naomi, on which 196 out of 421 passengers died on the voyage from Liverpool to Quebec.
Reversing the course of this 1847 eviction, since 2017 a hotel in the remote town of Ballaghaderreen in Co. Roscommon gave asylum to around 334 Syrians fleeing war-stricken homelands (though the contract with the former Abbyfield Hotel expires in December 2019). This accommodation was one of a number of Emergency Reception and Orientation Centres (EROC) across Ireland providing sanctuary during the height of the recent mass migration of people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe.
Latter day ‘coffin ships’, particularly those crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa, are well documented. Since 1993, a group called United for Intercultural Action has been compiling a list of ‘documented deaths of refugees and migrants due to the restrictive policies of “Fortress Europe” ‘ (here), which numbered 36,570 as of 1 April 2019 (though there would be many more undocumented). Earlier this week there were reports of migrants jumping off an overcrowded Spanish rescue ship and trying to swim to Lampedusa. By that stage, the Proactiva Open Arms ship had been refused entry by Italy for over three weeks since far right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has taken a hard line on migration and is attempting to close Lampedusa to migrant rescue ships.
Meanwhile back in the province of Ulster, following the revelations of the leaked ‘Yellowhammer’ report, a suspected bomb was reported near the border of Co. Fermanagh and Co. Cavan close to the Cavan to Clones road. When PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) officers attended the scene, a bomb exploded nearby, leading police to believe that they had been lured to the spot by dissidents attempting to murder PSNI officers. I overheard someone in Cavan say: ‘Any excuse, they’ll come out of the woodwork’. It is a common sentiment amongst borderland locals fearful of renewed sectarian violence if the border is fortified following Brexit. (Undoubtedly, the incident would have brought unpleasant memories to many older locals of the bombing in the border town Belturbet in Co. Cavan on 28 December 1972. Two teenagers, Geraldine O’Reilly (aged 15) and Paddy Stanley (aged 16) lost their lives. Eight others were seriously injured. Both of the youngsters were on Christmas holidays from school. Geraldine was waiting for her order in a local chip shop when the bomb hit. Paddy was calling his parents from a public phone box when he lost his life. Across the border in Co. Monaghan, another bomb had been detonated earlier in the day, seriously injuring two men. A third bomb exploded outside a pub at Mullnagoad, near Pettigo, in Co. Donegal. Nobody claimed responsibility for the Belturbet attack, but it was thought to be the work of loyalist paramilitaries.)
These are just two recent examples that suggest how ‘border thinking’ (Walter Mignolo) tempers the way the contemporary world is perceived, performed and produced. The complex interplay between borders, as well as frontiers like the Mediterranean, represent multiple ranges of register: bridge – dividing line, porous – watertight, soft – hard, unauthorised – authorised, invisible – visible, no-man’s land – demarcation zone, etc. Rather than being marginal, borders are increasingly key nodes for understanding the contemporary political landscape. According to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their book Border as Method, ‘borders play a key role in the production of the heterogeneous time and space for contemporary global and postcolonial capitalism’.
For some years, I have been thinking about how concepts linked to hospitality may be a useful way of thinking through such negotiable and contested spaces. The point of departure was Jacques Derrida’s political analyses, in a sequence of seminars from the late 1990s,[1] in which he reads ‘hospitality’ as an aporetic space between the principles of unconditional or absolute hospitality – the principle of allowing whomever or whatever enters one’s domain without reservations or calculations – and conditional hospitality – the laws required to control and protect ‘home.’ Rather than setting these principles of hospitality as mutually exclusive forces, Derrida argues for an irreducible relation between the two.
Derrida understood ‘hospitality’ as an interrogative term to consider both public space as a bounded zone, in which the stranger/foreigner (étranger) is subject to the codes, rules and regulations of its host (home, city or state), and the common right of any stranger to any space; that is, the ethical imperative that the host receives whatever and whomever enters its domain. The radical basis of Derrida’s interpretation calls for the hyperbolic, unlimited ethics of (unconditional) hospitality to orient the (conditional) realm of legislation operating between hosts and guests, challenging the more conventional situation in which the unconditional is contained or guarded by the precepts of conditional hospitality. Radically re-orienting the conditional identity of hospitality, which Derrida summarises as the requirements for ‘a police inquisition, a registration of information, or a straightforward frontier control,’ invokes threshold politics as an ‘unstable place of strategy and decision.’ This, Derrida writes, is ‘[a] difference both subtle and fundamental, a question that arises on the threshold of “home,” and on the threshold between two inflections.’ For Derrida, this is an absolute principle: ‘An art and a poetics, but an entire politics depends on it, an entire ethics is decided by it.’[2]
[1] Key publications related to this topic include: Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. by George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1997); Adieu to Emmanual Levinas, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999); On Cosmopolitanism and Foregiveness, trans. by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000).
[2] Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Hospitality,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 66-7.