THE public burning of life-sized effigies of migrants in a boat has been condemned by the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, the Most Revd John McDowell, as “racist, threatening, and offensive”.
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 at 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 as the pyre was set ablaze. There had been multiple calls in advance 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 who risk everything to flee war, persecution, and hardship in search of 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 of your citizens. You shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in 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 is: racist, threatening, and offensive.
“It certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity or with Protestant culture, and is in fact inhuman and deeply sub-Christian. I hope that the many people from other countries who live in that area, and who contribute so much to the economy and to the diversity of Dungannon, can be reassured that it does not in any way represent the feeling of the vast majority of their neighbours.”
The Archbishop addressed the issue of migration at the Church of Ireland General Synod in 2024. “Ireland is not 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 how to integrate these newcomers and their needs into society, and what that means for social and physical infrastructure [News, 24 May 2024]. That oversight does not excuse us from our responsibility to seek justice for our neighbour. Political failures cannot disapply the law of love. If the well-being of our neighbour — wherever they may have come from — is becoming more precarious, then we are called through the law of love to work even harder for justice.”