Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. On a Dublin street two weeks ago, Yves Sakila died. The 35-year-old, who was of Congolese origin, was pinned down by security guards for almost five minutes after being accused of shoplifting a bottle of perfume from a department store. When the police arrived, Sakila was dead. I spoke to Dr Ebun Joseph, special rapporteur on racial equality and racism in Ireland, about what is being called Ireland’s “George Floyd moment”.

The impact of Yves Sakila’s death continues to reverberate across Ireland. Joseph was appointed to give an independent evaluation of the government’s National Action Plan Against Racism, days after several protests and a vigil in Dublin. I ask her what the mood is among Black communities in Ireland.

“[The incident] has brought a lot of fear and disappointment. We thought we had come a long way in our activism and challenge of injustice and racism, only to find that we are still in the same place,” she tells me.

Sakila’s death has shaken a widespread assumption that Ireland is to some degree immune to the violent excesses of countries such as the United States. Joseph suggests that there is thought to be a degree of Irish exceptionalism around race, due to its colonisation by the British. “This doesn’t happen in Ireland,” Joseph says. She also questions the reactions of bystanders, who she describes as “desensitised”. “I couldn’t hear people say, ‘No, stop, enough’, over 4 minutes and 44 seconds. That needs to be etched in our memories.”

Joseph expresses frustration and mistrust towards the state’s response to Sakila’s death. The postmortem was inconclusive, and the Garda, Ireland’s police force, repeated claims that Sakila knocked an elderly man to the ground as he ran from security. Joseph feels these claims served as a distraction from Sakila’s death. She and others have been attacked online, she tells me, by people saying: “‘You’re talking about someone who was a thief, you’re not asking about the old man who was knocked down.’”

Joseph feels that there is insufficient evidence to back these claims. “It would be great if we could believe what we hear,” she tells me. But there is little trust and a lot of controversy. Discouraging speculation, Joseph is focused on what is verifiable from the footage: that five security officers restrained Sakila with what appears to be excessive force, leading to his death. Given this, Joseph asks, how can a postmortem be inconclusive?

False equivocation

Joseph says that Irish racism is insidious because it is often couched in concerns about immigration, and housing scarcity – which immigrants are blamed for. There’s a clear dishonesty in conflating these issues. Joseph points out that Ireland’s largest immigrant population comes from the UK, telling me that white immigrants are treated as “more welcome, more acceptable” than arrivals from majority-Black countries. “If we’re not complaining about immigration from the UK, then it shows us that immigration is not the problem. It is about a set of people.”

I tell Joseph that it seems like the mood in Ireland has declined quite rapidly. “Truly,” she agrees, “it has got much worse.” Reporting on racist hate crime in Ireland is scant, however last year a series of attacks terrified immigrant communities in Dublin, followed by violent protests outside asylum hotels. Joseph tells me that this anti-immigration hostility has led to a generalised sense of “unsafety and insecurity” among Black people. Whether you are an immigrant or not, she points out that hostility chooses you “based on your skin colour”. At the time of Sakila’s death, he had been living in Ireland for more than 20 years.

A reckoning on Irish racism?

Joseph feels that Ireland’s racism problem runs deep – all the way to the heart of the establishment. Yet there is no widespread acknowledgment that there is a serious racism crisis in the country. “You cannot fix what you don’t accept, what you can’t name, what you don’t identify,” Joseph tells me. “Even in high places, in government offices – people who should know better – they still argue,” she says, with some claiming that racism isn’t real. When she has shown peers and colleagues the racist abuse she receives online, some have dismissed them as bots from the US. “Denial is a major problem.”

Might the distressing death of Sakila finally force things out in the open, and trigger a reckoning on Ireland’s racism? Joseph tells me that she hopes that it might serve as a wake-up call. But I can hear the doubt in her voice. Her misgivings soon surface, mainly around the inevitable backlash that Black people would probably face. “There is a major price to pay for speaking out,” she tells me. “You are silenced, challenged, you’re accused of not being grateful. Why should we be grateful when racism – personal and structural – is still happening in your face?”

But I hear Joseph’s sense of hope break through when she speaks of the younger generation of Black Irish people. She notices a sense of confidence and ownership when they discuss Irishness and their identities. “A lot of young Black people are speaking up about their experiences of racism. They are not stopping. But resilience should not take the place of accountability.”

Until that accountability comes, Joseph says, Black Irish people know that what happened to Sakila was not an anomaly. It does happen in Ireland. The country now joins a grim roll call of others that have faced their own watershed deaths. It remains a distressing, repetitive pattern: that societies are only forced to confront their systemic racism once a Black person dies in plain sight.

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