Last November in Dublin, the second in command of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office, Sergiy Kyslytsya, got an unexpected insight into delicate Irish sensitivities.
During a closed-door discussion with TDs, the Ukrainian suggested that geographical remoteness no longer protected countries such as Ireland and Portugal – upon which the Fianna Fáil TD and chair of the Oireachtas Foreign Affairs Committee, John Lahart, interjected: “Stop. You have crossed a line”.
Kyslytsya was stunned. How was he to know that he was trampling on Irish neutrality? How many people would have known that?
In an interview with Lara Marlowe in Kyiv, Kyslytsya compared our sensitivities surrounding security to Irish nervousness about discussion around contraceptives years ago. “Several decades ago, the Irish were reluctant to speak about contraceptives. Security is something you need to discuss, but which makes you very nervous.”
It’s an unsettling story. Ukraine is an European Union membership candidate, so a top insider’s candid views should be of particular interest. The country is fighting for its literal existence against an aggressor whose army continues to butcher, bomb and rape Ukrainian citizens and has abducted tens of thousands of their children while blathering about reuniting Ukraine and other republics – ie other EU members – with “their historic motherland”.
This time four years ago Nato and the United States turned down the Ukrainian president’s desperate calls for a no-fly zone because they feared Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s nuclear retaliation. We cowered even after the discovery of mass graves and bodies with tied hands littering the streets of Bucha.
Some in their western comfort zones were too busy consulting the useful idiots’ glossary – “yeah, but the US/Nato military-industrial complex…” – to notice the rubble and mass graves that were once Mariupol, a vital port city. Headlines here warned that we were heading towards a war economy and that fuel and food prices were going through the roof in the words of Taoiseach Micheál Martin. These have. We’ve just forgotten why.
[ Fuel protests were a display of mine-is-bigger-than-yours machismo ]
We were shielded from soaring energy costs by Government cash injections while neutrality ideologues talked a heady game about soft power and pounced on bits of Government humanitarian aid that might conceivably assist some military objective.
Our default position, then and now, is that instead of donating military aid, Ireland would welcome Ukrainian refugees with generous supports and no cap on numbers. It was always going to be a logistical challenge in a pre-existing housing crisis, but that was presumably our moral deal.
In the end, over 112,000 received temporary protection here. That ranks us eighth in the EU when measured per thousand of population, according to February Eurostat figures. Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic combined account for three-fifths of 5.3 million Ukrainians scattered across the EU.
Around a third of our arrivals have returned home or gone elsewhere, similar to other European countries where surveys have been done. That means 80,000 or so may be planning to stay. Some go back periodically to check on family or property, something often seized upon by sofa warriors to suggest the country must therefore be safe enough to live in.
There is one way to find out, although the Department of Foreign Affairs “strongly” advises against it. Any truth-seeking Irish citizen armed with a passport, medical insurance covering war risks, and proof-of-travel purpose can visit for three months and see for themselves.
Not to worry that four out of five Ukrainians know someone who has been killed or that around seven in 10 believe Russia wants to destroy the Ukrainian nation, according to polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) – or that the country is coping with 3.7 million internally displaced souls.
Back here, to little surprise, the initial surge of generosity has steadily waned. Nearly eight in 10 respondents to a Sunday Independent poll agree with the Government’s decision to start winding down financial and accommodation supports. KIIS polling show that Ukrainians back home agree.
The institute’s executive director, Anton Grushetskyi, told Marlowe that while Ukrainians were aware that Ireland had received large numbers of Ukrainian refugees, they had no objection to Ireland cutting their benefits. That’s because Ukrainians in Ukraine feel less sympathy for refugees abroad than for internally displaced people, he said. “Stories that while we are dying under bombardment they receive benefits do not create good feelings. A lot of people in Ukraine believe that after more than four years of war, they’ve had enough time to integrate and earn money.”
The challenge for us as a decent, generous people is to look past malign efforts to paint refugees as homogenous blobs and to remember that no two refugees are the same. As an emigrant nation we know that better than most. They differ in their family circumstances, their grief and loss and trauma, their qualifications and command of language, their vulnerabilities. Many will flourish, but some will continue to need help.
Unless we collapse into social-media-driven Darwinism, that shouldn’t be hard to grasp. While 79 per cent supported the temporary protection benefits wind-down in the weekend poll, only 22 per cent said Ukrainians had not made a positive contribution to Irish society.
For the broader picture, Sergiy Kyslytsya should have a glance at respondents’ “most important priorities”. He might note that the Russia/Ukraine war falls last at 1 per cent, that defence is at 3 per cent, that Israel/Gaza is at 4 per cent and the Trump administration at 5 per cent.
Understandably the cost of living (55 per cent) and housing (45 per cent) come first and second respectively, with immigration now a distant third (20 per cent), but the barely acknowledged geopolitical drivers of these – the origins of much of the world’s pain – surely tell him and us something about the popular mindset. Is this what we mean by neutrality?