Eamonn Fitzgerald: August 2008 Archives

"This is going to be dangerous and expensive, Mao," said Murphy Van Hool.
They had crossed over from Avenue Louise and were strolling towards Tenbosch, a public park in Ixelles popular with retired Eurocrats.

"How much?" asked Mao.
"Each case is different," replied Murphy. "I really can't say, but we'll be dealing with gangsters so I'd advise you to give them what they ask for. You don't want to owe these people money and you don't want them coming after you, either."

Mao fell silent as they entered the park.

"Some of these probably voted for the Irish Exclusion Act," said Murphy, looking at the well-dressed, silver-haired men and women admiring the exquisite landscaping. They stopped and sat on a seat by the high wall that helped make Tenbosch an oasis of tranquillity in busy Brussels.

"OK, Murps. What's the scenario?" asked Mao, as a angry-looking dark dog and its owner, a sturdy woman wearing a heavy green coat and what looked like a man's green hat, embellished with feathers, approached.

After waiting for the odd couple to pass by, Murphy began outlining Mao's future life.

She would deliver his profile to a Basque "businessman" who would manufacture a number of "digital families" for Mao. For a considerable sum of money, of course.

"You won't get to meet him," said Murphy. "So don't ask. It's a secret community, and I've never met him either. They don't like outsiders."

She explained how nothing about Mao in the future would be true. The identity on his communicator wouldn't be his own and his past would be a sham as well.

"If this involves identity theft..." said Mao.

"What's false and what's true is never as it seems," said Murphy, explaining that Mao would be entering a provisional world in which telling lies did not necessarily mean articulating falsehood. If it happened in the future that he had to reveal his identity, it would just be a layer behind which another identity existed.

"I'm going to be an outcast!" Mao said and smiled.

He thought of all the different jobs he could do, depending on the qualifications the Basques would create for him. Maybe he'd become a tennis coach, a recent fantasy, and he pictured the lonely wives he'd sleep with, "grass court widows", whose husbands were off working in Greenland.

"Yes. You'll be an outcast, and if you get caught, you'll be in very deep shit," said Murphy, ending Mao's daydream.

"But there is an alternative to prison, if the nab you," and she outlined the EUSA Admission Programme, which offered amnesty to those who confessed their "alienage". Mao would be expected to name names and if he did, Murphy and her friends could expect harsh consequences.

"Murphy, do you know anything about China's historical ambivalence towards the developed world?" asked Mao.
She looked at him, but couldn't manage a response.
"Because if you did, Murphy, you'd never even think for a second that I'd betray you."

Mao Kelly was eating dim sum in Huit-Huit Chien, a Chinese restaurant on Chée d'Alsemberg in Brussels, when the immigration police walked in. "They said, 'Don't move. Show us your ID'".

"So I gave them a very good student card that identified me as a Catholic Taiwanese post-grad scholar at Louvain. That'll keep them busy for a while," he said, smiling.

Mao was sitting across a table from Murphy Van Hool, founder of Expatriate Irish Respectable Europeans, a voluntary organization that, officially, gave legal advice to expatriates who were in trouble with bureaucrats, employers or landlords.

"I've been busy recently," she said, brushing back the blond hair that kept falling across her eyes. "Look. Two hundred files open and nearly all of them about someone who was fired summarily or denied payment. It's just a few short steps from being fired to being arrested to being deported, you know."

Murphy Van Hool, the daughter of an Irish mother and a Belgian father, showed Mao the breakfast IPTV interview she'd given to a Swiss blogger a few hours earlier.

Irish immigrants, she told the interviewer, had flocked to mainland Europe from the early 1970s, drawn by the potential of the pub trade across the continent. Then, Ireland's integration into the world's economy in the 1990s led to a change in the profile of its émigrés. Remittances were less important and getting white-collar jobs in Brussels and Strasbourg became part of the country's international development strategy.

Irish immigrant numbers rose rapidly across Europe in the early years of the 21st century. The result was that in some NGOs and Quangos there were offices comprised entirely of Irish officials.

The Irish, however, had very low rates of participation in trade unions and political parties. They were also more likely to spend time with other Irish migrants in bars watching football because social interaction was frustrated by language barriers as most Irish insisted on speaking English only.

"Today, the Irish European experience is bleak," Murphy Van Hool told the interviewer. "It is marked by constant anxiety about immigration status. Since the tightening of visa regulations in 2010, the number of undocumented Irish has risen significantly, and while the statistics show they are disproportionately affected by crime, they are the least likely to report their experiences to the police."

They also earned less than others, she added. The unskilled were the most affected. "Most of them are doing cash-in-hand work, like slaves," said Van Hool. "Governments don't care. They just want non-EU people out of here."

The blogger cut to a French report on Irish workers that quoted Jacinta, a 28-year-old lawyer from Dublin, living in Paris. She described the sort of routine typical of many compatriots.

"I work seven days a week," she said. "I wake up at 5 am and start work at 6 am. Until 7 am, I clean a nursery. After that, I clean an optician's office, which includes the toilets. I finish at noon. Then from 1 pm to 3 pm, I clean an office. After that, I go home for a rest. From 4 pm to 2 pm I work in a bar."

"It's quite common," Van Hool to the interviewer. "They sleep for a few hours; they don't have any social life. They don't complain, because they're afraid of being deported."

The blogger cut to Iarfhlaith Ó Tuathail, Ireland's most influential pundit, who began to speak of the "Irish Diaspora" and how the overseas Irish were akin to the Jews of the early 20th century.

"Most of them dream of returning home one day," said Ó Tuathail.

But Mao didn't. He had grown used to the European way of life.

"Murphy, when I go back to Ireland, I don't feel I belong there," he said. "It's different. The weather's bad. People's teeth are bad. I feel like an outsider in Ireland."

Mao was struck by the fact that he was doubly alienated: From his own ethnic group and from the country in which he had been born.

"When are you going to wake up? For fuck's sake! When are you going to grow up?"
Mao Kelly had developed the habit of talking to himself after he'd accepted that he was a loner — in his early teens, in other words.

It was late morning and he was awake. But it wasn't the aftertaste of the absinthe or the pain in his head that had brought on the rebuking. No. He was upset that he had misled a woman who had been honest with him. Yvette was also gorgeous and his restless sleep had been filled with graphic fantasies involving her in various settings.

"Jesus, you are mad," he said to the bathroom mirror, as he recalled what he had done.

After upbraiding himself for another five minutes, he turned to cursing the other great scapegoat in his life: politics.

Mao, for most of his early life, had ignored politics. And then it was too late because politics took an intense interest in him. Not only because of his revolutionary work in artificial intelligence, which involved subverting 35 international laws, but because of his status as "alien European" within the European United States Alliance. He was a fugitive and, to his shame this morning, a deceitful one.

He tried to recall the sequence of events that had led to this mess. As always, it went back to 2010.

When the people of Ireland rejected the Berlin Treaty in 2010, which was an amended version of the Paris Treaty they had rejected in 2009, which was a modified version of the Lisbon Treaty they had rejected in 2008, the European Union, as it was then called, lost its patience with the stubborn islanders.

The Brussels mandarins responded to the 2010 rebuff by cutting off the generous EU development funding that had become a key component of Ireland's budgeting following the collapse the former "tiger" economy at the end of 2009. The wilful Irish reacted by reducing the nation's corporate tax rate to 0 percent, thus matching the Cayman Islands.

Enraged, the EU ejected Ireland from the Euro currency zone (its place was taken by Albania) and Dublin then astonished the global markets with a breathtaking counterstroke: It declared that Ireland was becoming a tax haven and that it was simultaneously joining Gibraltar, Andorra and Monaco to form the GAIM gambling association. The four launched a 24/7 virtual reality casino that soon became the world's most popular and lucrative betting business. Overnight, Ireland became a favourite holiday destination for risk-appreciative Afghan and Cuban millionaires and its distinctive green passports traded for millions on the black market.

In the final act of the "European Treaty War", as it became known, the successor to the EU, the EUSA, under President Bruni, rescinded the rights that Irish citizens had enjoyed under previous European agreements and imposed strict visa limits on the country's tourists and workers.

Engrossed in his ground-breaking work in the Republic of Flanders and uninterested in politics, Mao Kelly let all these developments take their course without acknowledging their importance or preparing himself for their impact.

When his employer informed him that she had no option but to offer his job to a qualified EUSA citizen, Mao, after recovering from shock, made his decision. Unwilling to return to the rain, he decided to go on the run.