This matter concerns a Japanese woman tourist. I am not sure if I should mention her name, although it was mentioned extensively in the other House. She is a woman from a wealthy professional background in Tokyo who has visited Europe on a number of occasions. She is interested in James Joyce and has an Irish boyfriend, with whom she had planned for some time to visit Ireland for Bloomsday. He arrived in advance but she never made it because she was arrested at Dublin Airport and subsequently deported. A number of matters of considerable concern arise in this context.
She was coming here for a clearly defined, legitimate, bona fide purpose. The Government has generously supported the development of worldwide interest in the works of James Joyce in which Japan, among other countries, has shown a considerable interest. She entered Ireland on 14 June from Amsterdam and was arrested. Eventually, a colleague in the other House, Deputy De Rossa, was apprised of this matter, which he raised in the other House. The facts put on the record there are extremely interesting and important.
She was apparently suspected of using Ireland as a backdoor for entry into the United Kingdom. That suggests we are being used as the mucky boys by the British Administration and that we are prepared to deport people unceremoniously, simply on the merest suspicion that they may be using this country to enter the United Kingdom, without well-founded grounds. She was held incommunicado for several hours before her Irish boyfriend discovered where she was. He was allowed speak to her on the telephone but had only time to ask her how she was before the telephone was suddenly put down, which suggests a fairly arbitrary approach to the whole situation.
The boyfriend, Mr. Rose, contacted Deputy De Rossa's office the next morning. His office made 17 attempts to contact immigration at Dublin Airport, using telephone numbers supplied by both the aliens office and Aer Rianta. The telephone was answered four times but was hung up before anything could be said. That alone raises questions. We are entitled to an explanation of this extraordinarily high handed behaviour. It is the kind of behaviour a number of us expressed concerns about when legislation dealing with immigration control and placing a great degree of authority in the hands of anonymous immigration officers was passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas.
Deputy De Rossa's office managed to contact the office of the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform and asked it to contact immigration, which was done. The Minister's office then told his office that nothing could be done, in other words, an immigration officer is in a position of authority senior to that of the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform.
There are other worrying aspects to this. This does not come from the persons centrally involved but from an independent witness who was once a Cabinet Minister in this State. Deputy De Rossa's secretary talked to an official, whose name the Deputy has but to whom he referred in the Dáil as Official A. This official claimed the Japanese lady had admitted she wanted to live in England with her boyfriend. She denies this emphatically and asked why she would say this when her family were expecting her home to return to work in ten days' time. Official A was heard over the telephone saying that she was not going anywhere except back to Japan. This suggests a very high-handed approach. When it was asked if her boyfriend could speak to her, this was briefly allowed but in the background Official A was clearly heard saying "Keep hold of her, do not let her go up those stairs, keep your eyes on her". When she came to the phone she was confused, frightened and crying, which is not entirely surprising.
The Minister stated in his reply "The decision on whether to grant leave to land is taken by an immigration officer and the grounds for refusal are set out in the Aliens (No. 2) Order, 1999", which makes my point that an extraordinary degree of authority is vested in an unnamed and apparently unaccountable officer. This entire situation needs to be looked at, way beyond the confines of this case. That matter was referred to three times in the Minister's reply. The reply ended with a rather lame phrase about how "the matter was handled in a reasonable way in all the circumstances". I put it to the Minister of State that it was not.
I have a communication from Mr. Albert Rose, the boyfriend in question, in which he indicates the purpose of her visit and states she was stopped by immigration because she had been refused a visa to enter the United Kingdom. It is true she was refused a visa last year. We all know what the immigration service in Great Britain is like and the attitude it takes to people of a different racial type. When the Japanese lady explained to the UK immigration officials that she had studied for a lengthy period in Britain she was paroled into Britain and allowed to stay there for four days. Her passport was stamped with the information that she had been refused entry into Britain, but she was allowed in on that occasion for four days.
When she was making arrangements to come to Dublin she was concerned about this, which was not put on the record of the other House. She visited the Irish Embassy in Tokyo. She was told, quite plainly and clearly, when she explained she was concerned she might be refused entry to Ireland because of this stamp on her passport, that it was a different situation and that she did not even require a visa for entry to Ireland. Acting upon the advice of the Irish Embassy in Tokyo, she completed her plans and bought a return ticket to Tokyo, which cost 140,000 yen.
The immigration officers stated that one of them had asked Ms Tsuchiya if she would enter the United Kingdom while she was in Ireland. Both Mr. Rose and Ms Tsuchiya have stated categorically that this question was never asked. A charitable interpretation would be that there were linguistic difficulties. However, the question was never asked; if it had been, it would have been answered in the proper way.
The circumstantial evidence I have produced from independent witnesses suggests there was already a high-handed, almost hostile, attitude on the part of the immigration officer concerned. This material was overheard by the office of a former Minister of this State.
She was then locked up in a cell and was not allowed to be visited by her boyfriend until the day she was leaving. She was upset by the entire matter and asked her friend what she had done to deserve this treatment. I have also been told by Mr. Rose that he has just heard from Tokyo that an entire group of her friends who had intended to travel to Ireland on a cultural pilgrim age have cancelled the trip in the light of what has happened.
This is a very nasty incident in which the Minister appears to be subordinate to an unnamed immigration official who, it seems from the evidence which I have gathered from the record of the other House and discussions with those involved, behaved in a high-handed and arbitrary manner and with a degree of harassment.
It is astonishing that someone wishing to visit this country with a return ticket in their pocket, a job to return to, a person from a wealthy background in Tokyo, who had a bona fide reason for being here, who had visited London and been educated in England, who even on the occasion when she was refused entry by the British authorities was paroled in for four days, was not even allowed to remain for Bloomsday despite the fact that Deputy De Rossa offered to act as a guarantor for her. It is incredible that the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform for this State was either paralysed or acting as a subordinate to an immigration official at Dublin Airport.
I suggest that the Government should extend an invitation to this person to come back to Ireland at the expense of the State and we will entertain her in the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.
Since then I have received a letter from a resident of Dublin expressing horror at what has happened but not, I am sorry to say, surprise. He contrasts this with what happened to him when he went to Japan. Although he did not have a visa, he experienced no difficulties whatever. The last sentence of his letter, however, details how he was pulled over by immigration officers in Dún Laoghaire last year. That had never happened in Japan. He is white with even a few freckles as evidence of his ethnic purity. He thinks they thought the Irish he was speaking was a foreign language. There are matters of serious concern here.
