Black Dubliner Sympathetic to Refugees

Jude Hughes is that rarest of Dubliners, a 54-year-old native who is black.

Born to an Irish mother and a Trinidadian father, Hughes grew up in an Ireland where the only other blacks were occasional tourists and a few student doctors at the Royal College of Surgeons. Hughes grins when he recalls how teachers fussed over him as a child, convinced his blackness meant he would excel in music and sports.

“They nicknamed me Floyd Patterson at school,” he says, chuckling. “That was all Irish people knew about blacks.”

But Hughes, a tailor, is no longer exotic in his hometown. In the last few years, hate mail has been shoved in his letterbox, his store sign was daubed with a swastika, and he has been taunted on buses with cries of “go back to your own country.”

Hughes suffers the insults in silence--his way of taking a blow for the refugees.

“I have an advantage,” he says, sewing on a vintage machine in his Middle Abbey Street store, “because I know the mentality that people are coming from. It’s just fear of the unknown.”

Like others, Hughes believes his country is on the brink of enormous change, that how it accepts immigrants will define it forever.

“Right now I’m a novelty, a black person with a Dublin accent,” Hughes says. “But there are going to be a lot more of us.”

Hughes describes first-time customers who dash into his store, only to stop in their tracks when they see him.

“Some say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I must be in the wrong place,’ ” he says. “You know bloody well they are not in the wrong place.”

He shrugs. “That’s their problem,” he says. “Because they are going to have to learn to live with black people on an equal basis if they want to live in an Ireland that is becoming multicultural.”

Hughes, whose wife is from Zambia, will do his part by rearing his children in a nondenominational school, by teaching them about the different cultures shaping their land.

“Irish people have to remember that when they needed to get out of poverty, they had to go and mix with other cultures,” Hughes said. “Give these people a fair chance. Don’t deprive them of their basic rights to live as normal human beings.”