First published in Ireland on Sunday (now the Irish Mail on sunday) on 29/07/2007.
By: MICHAEL O’FARRELL
Investigative Correspondent in Romania.
MAYOR DOREL Cosma screws up his face as if to spit. Sitting in his town hall office, he does not bother to disguise his contempt, perhaps hatred, for the Roma community.
‘Tigan Borit’ – gypsy puke – he tells the translator, who nods in agreement.
The Roma people he despises so much live at the end of a rough dirt track on a hilltop clearing above the pretty town of Vadu-Crisului in western Romania.
Conditions in the squalid, makeshift commune are appalling, more akin to a Third World country than you would expect to find in the EU. But many houses, some constructed entirely of mud and waste wood, have new satellite dishes fastened to the walls – just one of the apparent inconsistencies of Roma life.
Another is the manner in which members of the community managed to make their way to Ireland to set up camp on the Ballymun slip road of Dublin’s M50 motorway for the past two months.
Eleven of those who sold horses or borrowed money to raise the E600 needed to travel to Dublin came from here. The rest – mostly members of the extended Rostas family – come from within a 60km radius.
Mayor Cosma knows precisely which ones went to Ireland. Having heard that the Irish Mail on Sunday had been to the commune, he summoned us for an interview.
Sliding a freshly printed file across the table containing the names of those sent home by the Irish authorities, he proceeds to list the houses and properties they own.
Already headline news for weeks in Ireland, Wednesday’s chartered flight from Dublin to Timisoara catapulted the issue into every Romanian newspaper and TV channel as well.
The Irish deportation is the second such repatriation in recent weeks.
France, too, sent over 100 Roma home last month.
While much of the Roma story is hard to validate, I discovered one unquestionable fact last week – that in their homeland they are subjected to a degree of racism that is as sickening as it is profoundly shocking.
Listen to one of the 30- strong media scrum which spent all of Wednesday night waiting for the authorities to process the returned migrants at Timisoara airport.
‘They go abroad and steal and give us a bad name. The Nazis had the right idea – we should turn them into soap,’ one of Romania’s top press photographers, a well-educated and otherwise cosmopolitan man in his 30s, told me. He wasn’t alone.
‘You see – they are not like us. Look at their dark skin,’ said another photographer when the press was allowed into the arrivals hall to take photos. ‘They are like animals.’ Only local Roma groups would speak out in their support.
‘We are not very proud about their behaviour but we know that our country hasn’t done anything for them. They did not have jobs or a decent life and we want to help them,’ said Nastase Amdo of the Parudimos Association.
‘We would like to ask the Irish people to not see the Roma people for what they have done but to understand that they have been discriminated against here and in other places and they don’t have opportunities that others have and they need help.’ Amid the swirl of claim and counterclaim, the truth is hard to find. Having embarrassed the Romanian authorities internationally, the M50 Roma are now the subject of a campaign to discredit the claims of poverty they used to justify their trip to Ireland.
All week, the Romanian Ambassador in Dublin, Silvia Stancu Davidoiu, has been arguing that the group could have had local jobs had they wanted. Her claim was backed up by the manager of a local Italian-owned shoe factory, who told the MoS he could not attract enough workers.
In turn, those who returned from Ireland said they had tried to get jobs at the firm but had been turned away because they had lice. Others said the firm would not let them wear traditional dress to work.
Ambassador Stancu Davidoiu also said the Roma lied about their plight to manipulate and mislead the Irish public.
Mayor Cosma backed up the claim – though, when listening to him, I had to keep reminding myself that this is a man whose hatred of the gypsies is undisguised. ‘They have houses. You should know they have property and land and horses and animals.’ His file includes the house numbers of those who travelled to Ireland, the size of their houses, whether the occupants were registered as agricultural workers, and whether social-assistance payments were being received.
In each case, the file indicates that social welfare payments were cancelled on the first of June this year – roughly the date the group arrived in Ireland. If they were getting them, the welfare payments would amount to about €100-a-month, paid in return for 72 hours of community service.
But Mayor Cosma pointed out that there are other ways of making money. Under a new law, introduced this year, newly married couples receive a gift of €200 from the state. In the past two weeks, the commune in Vadu-Crisului has seen 32 weddings.
He says: ‘You cannot do anything with them. They refuse to work. Several years ago, a Norwegian NGO gave them clothes and books and they sold them all.
‘Last year, we brought 40 trucks with rocks for the road to the commune. They stole the stones and used them for their houses.’ There appears to be no middle ground in the battle of lies, innuendo, half-truths and hatred being waged between the Roma and local officials. In the Vadu-Crisului commune itself, for example, members of the Rostas family denied all of the mayor’s accusations and maintained they were not being helped in any way.
The houses identified in the mayor’s list consist of a mixture of mud walls, crumbling asbestos sheeting, corrugated iron and at times rough bricks. One or two are in better condition but, in many cases, the sparse furnishings and colourful gypsy mats hanging on the walls inside are the only thing that distinguishes a home from the ramshackle buildings the gypsies keep their horses in.
Such conditions may be better than living under plastic in the mud and rain on the M50 – but only marginally.
One of the commune’s elder figures, Baron Rostas, said: ‘The mayor, he does nothing. He promised water and it never came. He promised a road and it never came.
‘We are getting nothing. No social welfare. We have nothing. The mayor will not give us anything. They cut the electricity off three months ago. We had no money to pay the bill. We went to Ireland to make money to pay the electricity.’ Still dressed in a Hawaiian shirt donated to him in Dublin, Baron and all the other men sport home-made tattoos of their naked wives on their arms and chests.
In the 40-degree heat, they all have a habit of pulling their shirts up over large pot bellies as they speak, sometimes revealing multiple jagged scars amid the rough black tattoos.
As we speak, Baron pulls out the business card of solicitor Catherine Ghent of Dublin legal firm Kelleher and Doherty. One of two Roma who launched a legal fight to stay in Ireland with the assistance of Pavee Point, he is anxious to know how his case is going.
Like many others, he would like to go back.
He said: ‘Life is good there. There is nothing for us here. The Irish people were good to us. In Ireland the people were good. They have a big soul there and they helped us.
‘It could have been Germany, France, anywhere, but we heard there was a good living to be made in Ireland. We should be allowed to go anywhere we want.’
Others though have learned their lesson.
‘Everybody told us life is easier there, but it wasn’t like that at all. People were giving us food, but it wasn’t as good as it was back home,’ another member of the family, Liliana Rostas, told me just after the charter flight landed in Timisoara airport.
‘We left Ireland because we wanted to, nobody forced us. The people from there treated us very well, helped us, and gave us food. Nobody laid a hand on us, God bless them.’ By far the vast majority of those who came to Ireland live in Tileajd, a town 60km away from the Vadu-Crisului commune.
Here conditions are a little better, thanks to the presence of Baptist charity the Smiles Foundation, which has built a modern school and provides showers and meals to children.
The Roma community here is split into two factions – a camp close to a railway and a camp beside a canal – following a brutal murder 40 years ago. Neither side speaks to the other and there is frequent violence.
But, ironically, members of both factions lived side by side in the M50 encampment.
The prejudice and overt racism expressed by the mayor of Vadu-Crisului is echoed by his counterpart here. ‘They fight with each other, they steal fruits and crops from the fields. They don’t want to go to work. They don’t want to do anything,’ said Mayor Gheorghe Groza.
He, too, had a list, containing more than 52 names, of those from his town who went to Ireland.
Standing up with his arm in the air, he let the faxed page unravel down to his feet, the end of it crumpling up on the floor. Every name, bar one, was a Rostas family member.
As before, property and social-welfare details were outlined. According to the record, roughly half were not receiving any social welfare but more than 26 – highlighted in yellow by the local police commander – had some form of criminal record.
At a discussion organised for the press the previous day at the Smiles Foundation school, regional officials spoke in conciliatory terms about the government’s responsibility to integrate marginalised and disadvantaged groups.
‘We have a policy of improving the situation of the Roma living in Romania but these things cannot be done overnight,’ said regional official Traian Abrudan.
‘We hope now that with the help of the EU, the government will be able to develop a better community that will be able to sustain all Romanians regardless of origin.
‘It is important for us to understand that we can all live in the EU, that we all have the same rights and the same dignities.’ But when alone, Mayor Groza didn’t even attempt to pretend he believes in any such plans.
When asked, he produced a copy of the regional anti-poverty and social integration plan. ‘Yes, we have the plan and are trying to implement it,’ he assured us. However, when asked whether there was anything positive at all he could think of about the Roma people, his answer was brutally simple.
‘Absolutely nothing,’ he responded, banging his fist on the table. ‘They fight, they make scandal. It’s true that they are a nation that does not want to work. They just want to be given things.
‘Before it was different – there was order. Now if the police go to the Roma people, they will lose their jobs in two days when they complain.’ How did he feel when the Roma group returned to his town in the early hours of Thursday morning?
‘Oh it was a black, black day,’ he said with a weary sigh. Would he be happy if they went away again?
‘Very happy,’ he answered with a sweeping of his arms as if he was mentally pushing the community away from his town.
He even went so far as to claim that Roma should not have the same rights as other EU citizens.
‘They aren’t European citizens – they are migrants,’ he said, as he put the regional integration plan back in its place under a pile of documents on his desk.
Kevin Hoy, founder and chief executive of the Smiles Foundation, acknowledged both the faults of many in the Roma community and the extraordinary level of racism directed against them by ordinary Romanians.
He said: ‘The racism, it’s very sad. But it’s based on the history of the Roma people fighting for survival and having to resort to very unsociable things, whether that’s begging or even stealing.
‘It would be a fool that denies that that’s how they’ve lived for so many years. I think there are some in the community who realise that the world is developing so fast that they have to change with it. But there are others who do not want to change at all.’ He added: ‘They don’t get an education and the social supports they receive are inadequate.
‘Therefore, they are forced to less attractive ways of survival. But this has been their history for a long time and, having that travelling nature in their blood, they are more inclined to get on a plane and head across the sea to Ireland.’ Mr Hoy also said the Irish authorities-should be more careful in allowing free access to EU citizens if situations like the M50 camp are to be avoided in future.
He said: ‘The EU opens up borders. It brings freedom to people and, therefore, choices can be made.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t set parameters for protecting people.
‘It might be better to say to someone coming into your country: “Who are you coming with? What are you going to do here? Where is your return ticket?” The questions they ask if you go to America, they should be asking within the EU.’
