Editorial - Is This America?

THE forced deportation of Derry native John McNicholl, snatched from his home and family in Philadelphia, asks some very tough questions of the Bush administration.

As graphically described by his son, Sean, his father was “kidnapped by strange men from our front door and bundled into an unmarked car. I ran down the street after the car but could not catch up to it. I later found out that these people were representatives of the United States government.”

These representatives of the government acted after McNicholl’s lawyer apparently did not file a necessary motion to keep his deportation case in the courts.

By all accounts McNicholl was a model citizen who had lived and worked in the Darby neighborhood of Philadelphia for decades. Back in the early 1980s, like many Northern Ireland Nationalists, he had been caught up in The Troubles and jailed by a non-jury court. He escaped and made his way to the U.S. where he settled down, raised a family and worked hard for his slice of the American dream.

He must have thought his worst nightmare of deportation had disappeared when the IRA ceasefire happened in August 1994, and the subsequent peace process led to an amnesty for all their prisoners.

McNicholl was a member of a splinter group of the IRA, the Irish National Liberation Army, which also went on ceasefire and was taken off the terrorist list by the U.S. government.

The complete irony of has happened is that Northern Irish authorities did not want McNicholl back because of the amnesty that would have meant his immediate release. The Irish government took him when the only likely alternative was that he would be held indefinitely in a U.S. jail.

McNicholl is just one of hundreds of Nationalists who fled to America during The Troubles. Most of them surely felt that the success of the peace process meant that they were free from fear of further persecution. This country, after all, has a stellar reputation for helping those who fled persecution from foreign lands.

Indeed, if McNicholl were Cuban he would have been welcomed with open arms. Recently, some Cubans who hijacked a plane were allowed stay on American soil, despite the gravity of their offense.

No, McNicholl was unfortunate that he was Irish and that he was making his living post-September 11. The overreaction of some in the Bush administration is evident from this act. Someone, somewhere must have looked at the file and decided that an Irishman could be torn from the bosom of his wife and children and sent back to Ireland without them.

As Sean McNicholl wrote, “Can someone from the Bush administration explain what we are to do, now that they have deported our father? Where is the justice, in the Justice Department of the U.S., for my family and me?”

The fact is, of course, that there is no justice for John McNicholl, only the nightmare separation from his wife and family who are now left with no means of support.

Is this America? Is this a country where a man can be snatched outside his home and bundled on an airline? After he was convicted in non-jury court by highly dubious evidence? Is this a message from the Bush administration to Irish Americans that the Irish struggle is of no concern to them?

The facts are that the Bush administration owes the Irish community an explanation for this dreadful act. Do they believe in the Irish peace process or not? Is this a calculated campaign to dog Irish political prisoners, now resident in the U.S., whose only crime was being born Catholic in Northern Ireland?

If this is so they should tell us. President Bush and his advisors would be far better off chasing al-Qaeda than innocent Irishmen simply trying to make a living.