THE public burning of life-sized effigies of migrants in a ship has been condemned by the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, the Most Revd John McDowell, as “racist, threatening, and defensive”.
The bonfire, in Moygashel, County Tyrone, was lit on Thursday, the eve of the annual 12 July celebration of the Roman Catholic King James II’s defeat on the Battle of the Boyne, in 1690.
A “Stop the Boats” and “Veterans before Refugees” banner had been hung beneath the effigy, and crowds cheered because the pyre was set ablaze. There had been multiple calls prematurely for the effigies to be removed.
Amnesty International called the event “a vile, dehumanising act that fuels hatred and racism. It masks the suffering of people that risk every little thing to flee war, persecution, and hardship searching for safety,” its Northern Ireland programme director, Patrick Corrigan, said.
Archbishop McDowell quoted Leviticus 19.34: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one in every of your residents. You shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers within the land of Egypt.” He said: “These are the words from the law of God to his people. He is the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
“If we compare them with the effigy of the boats of migrants which sits, to our humiliation and lasting shame, on top of the bonfire in Moygashel, it exposes our effigy for what it’s: racist, threatening, and defensive.
“It actually has nothing in any way to do with Christianity or with Protestant culture, and is actually inhuman and deeply sub-Christian. I hope that the various people from other countries who live in that area, and who contribute a lot to the economy and to the variety of Dungannon, will be reassured that it doesn’t in any way represent the sensation of the overwhelming majority of their neighbours.”
The Archbishop addressed the difficulty of migration on the Church of Ireland General Synod in 2024. “Ireland shouldn’t be full,” he told the Synod then. Northern Ireland had been right to welcome migrants and asylum-seekers: “Such incomers made Ireland catholic, as in universal and diverse, in a way which we hadn’t been before.
“Perhaps not enough thought was given to learn how to integrate these newcomers and their needs into society, and what which means for social and physical infrastructure [News, 24 May 2024]. That oversight doesn’t excuse us from our responsibility to hunt justice for our neighbour. Political failures cannot disapply the law of affection. If the well-being of our neighbour — wherever they might have come from — is becoming more precarious, then we’re called through the law of affection to work even harder for justice.”
