Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

Sadly, we’ve just heard the news that some ******** have broken into our house in France and trashed the place.

What seems pretty much a cert is that the things that they took (seemingly less than a dozen things in total although we need to do a full check) will be appearing in one of the vide greniers (car boot sales) over this weekend. Some of their customers will be less than pleased with their purchases as they include, among other things, a TV that can’t receive French TV programmes and a number of region 1 DVDs that won’t play on French DVD players.

It isn’t so much the things that they’ve taken which is annoying though: it’s that they simply trashed most rooms in the house looking for stuff that just wasn’t there. Thanks to the high prevalence of the black economy in France, most French households are likely to have quite a pile of cash stashed away but us foreigners just don’t work like that so their cash take amounted to a few euros at best.

In other countries there’d be an insurance claim, of course, but in France the insurance only pays out when you have the original receipts and, for the most part, people don’t have them so you end up paying a whole lot for insurance that realistically you will never be able to claim on.

Anyway, it looks like our notional holiday will be taken up with cleaning up the mess that they’ve left behind and wasting time with the insurance company.

Up until recent times the typical Gypsy image was of the cute caravan going along a country road in Ireland or perhaps of one of them coming round offering to tell your fortune.

However that changed towards the end of the 20th century with the cute caravans being replaced by ordinary ones and the images of the rubbish strewn wastelands created by roaming bands of these gypsies. Add to that the increase in petty crimes that always seemed to be associated with the arrival of a new band of these caravans and you can see why everyone else became less and less enchanted with them going from camp to camp.

So they were given housing.

Remembering that these people have a long tradition of being a travelling people dating back to their probable origin in India around a thousand years ago. I say “probable” because it’s next to impossible to truly trace the origins of a group of people who are nomadic as they don’t generally leave much evidence of their passing. You obviously can’t look for the typical archaeological remains that you would find with a settled group and are left with considering written accounts of their passing (of which there seems to be very little) or looking at less tangible things such as the structure of their language.

The snag is that giving them a fixed location without considering the substantial changes that would be necessary in their culture seems to have created major issues with their new neighbours. What seems to have happened is that some of the things deeply ingrained in their culture as a travelling people just doesn’t sit too well when they’re doing them constantly in a fixed location. For example, you’ll run out of people who want to get their fortune told after a few months which is fine if you’re moving on but not so good if you’re not. Thus, the fortune telling degrades into begging which itself isn’t well received and becomes more and more pushy over time too.

That life of travelling also had the problem that the children didn’t get educated as well as they might so there’s a tendency for the Gypsies to be pretty much totally unskilled. It’s not that they weren’t educated at all but that the education that they received was generally from within their families. Even when they did attend normal schools, a life of moving from school to school throughout a year obviously isn’t ideal for learning.

So in the end their name becomes “Gypsy scum”, the tolerance goes, they’re actively disliked and finally the local scum do something about it as happened recently in Belfast.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that it’s almost certainly going to at least a generation to get this fixed. Their culture needs to adjust to living in a fixed spot but to do that they’ll need to drop some of the customs that they’ve carried out for centuries as otherwise they’ll remain despised by the locals. Without that their children won’t get enough of an education to get out of the “unskilled trap” that they’re currently in and moreover their children will grow to hate the non-gypsies which will only cause them more trouble. Already their holocaust history has caused some of them to accuse any anti-gypsy feeling as coming from Nazi tendencies which definitely isn’t helping their integration.

So much went wrong in this particular case that it’s hard to know where to even start.

The social services have an awful lot to answer for in this one. For a start, although they didn’t directly kill Peter clearly their inept actions contributed to his death, one wonders whether a number of those involved shouldn’t be residing in jail somewhere at the moment? No, it won’t bring Peter back but it would send the strongest message to the social services people everywhere that the key social service that they should be providing isn’t money, it’s the protection of life. Disciplinary action is all very well but some jail time meted out is a much stronger message and one that seems more appropriate in this instance.

Related to this seems to be their inbuilt bias in favour of the underpriviliged. I don’t dispute that the social services generally are needed to support those on hard times, but their “keep the mother with the child” regardless of circumstances approach obviously didn’t work too well in this case. I’d also question their bias in favour of mothers too. We’d not have heard anything about Peter had his father been able to keep him and that’s how I’m sure we’d all have wished it to be. It’s definitely better for a child to be with a parent rather than being in care but that parent shouldn’t always have to be the mother as seems to be the case now.

Crazy as it seems, this attitude is what probably led to the doctor giving the killers the benefit of the doubt and thereby missing the injuries. That benefit of the doubt isn’t given to normal families as I found out when accused by a midwife of abusing my own son and frankly we felt at some risk of having him taken into care despite 1) him having no injuries and 2) the supposed abuse being merely a side-effect of him being born breech.

Then there’s the Orwellian handling of the case or rather information about the case as it’s proceeded. The court required all information that would identify the killers to be removed from websites around the world. Frankly the only thing that succeeded in doing was to create a feeling of revisionist history reminiscent of Orwell’s novel and has merely driven public commentary about the case to places like this. Even now, the notorious boyfriend can only be referred to as “the boyfriend” because he’s appealing against his conviction. Well, you would if you were him, wouldn’t you? After all, with the strong feelings that this case has generated his life in jail seems likely to be rather short and with an extremely unpleasant end.

That concealing of information is a major failing of this case. For instance, the government report couldn’t be handed out because it would identify some of the social workers. Let’s not forget that some of these people should be in jail; protecting them in this merely serves to let the authorities off the hook in terms of bringing the appropriate people to court. Thus, we only have the head of the social services section named (Liz Santry who one suspects won’t be a councilor after the next election).

Lot’s of lessons to be learned for sure. Let’s hope that the same mistakes aren’t repeated anytime soon.

No, not as an asylum seeker!

We’re following European Directive 2004/38/EC which is the directive which gives European citizens and their family members and dependants the right move to any other European country. In general terms to take advantage of this directive you need to be moving your family from one country to another. For example, if you are only British and are living in the UK then you can’t use this directive to get any residence rights for a non-European wife. However, in the special case of those who count as “people of Northern Ireland” it’s possible for a British citizen to exercise these rights by requiring the UK authorities to consider them to be Irish (see the British-Irish agreement).

Who counts as a “family member or dependant”? Basically it’s:

• the European citizen plus their spouse (or registered partner or partner in a durable [2 years or more] relationship) and
• the direct descendants of either one up to 21 (or older if they are dependant on the parent) and
• the dependant direct relatives in the ascending line of either (ie parents, grandparents, etc.) and
• any other dependant relatives or members of the household of the European citizen.

Which essentially translates as anyone who lives in the house of the European citizen in the country from which they are moving, regardless of their nationality (which paraphrases Articles 2 & 3 of the directive).Most people think they must have a visa to move to another country but if you are one of the people covered by the above paragraph then in fact you don’t courtesy of Article 5, paragraph 4 which lets you prove “by other means” that you are covered by this directive. For example, in our own case Wendy has an expired European Residence Permit in her passport thus proving that the directive applies to her so she doesn’t need a visa and neither does she need to go down the “Non-European citizen” queues at immigration control even though she’s Australian.

Now you might think that you’re sure to need a residence permit but even that’s not the case because  Article 25, paragraph 1 also has the option to “prove by other means” entitlement to the rights granted under this directive and specifically forbids possession of a residence permit to be used as a precondition for the exercise of any rights or completion of any administrative formality. Which means that, in practice, you never need to have the residence permit.

But, what rights does this directive actually give? Well, in practical terms it translates as giving anyone covered by the directive almost all the rights that a national of the country would have with limitations only in areas such as national security (eg you probably couldn’t work as a diplomat) and voting (although the European citizen can vote in local and European elections). Thus the authorities are required to treat Wendy as though she were British and had always been British.

That’s the theory, but how does it work out in practice. Well, Wendy doesn’t get any UK stamps in her passport these days and avoids the massive queues at some airports which simplifies our lives no end as we can all go through the “EU Citizen” immigration queues. She already has her National Insurance number from when we were here before but temporary ones are allocated once you start work in the UK if you don’t have one already. One current complication remains in connection with the doctor (and I suspect the dentist) which is that although the doctor’s office don’t have any problem in treating her, the Central Services Agency (CSA) are still asking for copies of her visa and residence permit which, of course, we can’t provide as we have neither and we just found out this morning that because of that they’ve told the doctor to take her off his list. That’s not really a big problem as worst case scenario from the doctor’s office end is that we fill in a temporary resident form every time we go to the doctor. It does have a potentially major upside in that as the CSA are breaking the law we could get quite a sizeable compensation payment…

So, overall, an easy, legal and free way to live & work in the UK.

One of the slightly peculiar effects of my five year absence is that it takes a while for the name of some people to come to mind that I’ve seen in the local supermarkets.

It’s not that I didn’t recognise Colin [test to see if he’s really reading this!] pretty much instantly, but that it took me AGES to remember his name! Is it just the five year gap, or creeping senility? Funnily enough I remembered David J’s name almost the instant I saw him even though I’ve worked a whole lot more with Colin over the years. Bryan’s a lot easier to remember of course in that I seem to have been constantly bumping into him in Tescos or Sainsburys every time that I’ve been over here.

Anyway, for Colin’s benefit, yes I’m back in NI. Why we’re back right now is down to a whole bunch of reasons that meant early in 2009 was always going to be the best time logistically for us to return and although it might seem a bit of a sudden decision, in fact we’d been aiming to be here since something like two and a bit years ago.