A collective of immigrants from Jordan delve into shared history in their new home

The five men met in a WhatsApp group, said four of them on Sunday, sitting at the café of Fitzwilliam Hotel on Stephen’s Green. 

They’re Shogaa Alkalalbeh, Mohammad Alfanatseh, Ghaleb Ghreiz and Ahmad Daggamseh.

The fifth guy lives in Cork, so he couldn’t make it, they said. 

Alfanatseh and Daggamseh are younger, shyer guys with short black beards. Alkalalbeh and Ghreiz are older and mellow. 

They were all born in Jordan and moved over to Ireland around three years ago. The WhatsApp group had been set up to support Arabs across Ireland, as they navigated bureaucratic hurdles. 

Later, Alkalalbeh, Alfanatseh, Ghreiz and Daggamseh decided to form a collective for Jordanian immigrants, said Alfanatseh in Arabic.

They compare notes with each other not just on immigration problems, but also on questions around setting up businesses and filing taxes, said Alkalalbeh. 

The Jordanians in Ireland Forum – which now has around 200 members and growing – was set up just two weeks before Ahmed Al Saqar, a Jordanian citizen, became a person of interest in the killing of Jamey Carney, he said.  

Carney, a mum, born in the United States, had been dating Al Saqar, having met him in Killarney in Co. Kerry, where they both lived.

Online anti-immigrant commentators have, as they often do, honed in on the nationality and ethnicity of Al Saqar, using his status as a “person of interest” to cast stigma on immigrants and people of colour writ large.

In the aftermath of the violent attack in Parnell Square in November 2023, Algerians in Ireland said they had felt shame and stigma, because of their shared citizenship and background with the suspect, who was later convicted of attempted murder of three children and stabbing a childcare worker who was trying to protect them.

Alkalalbeh and others in the new Jordanian forum say they lay low, in the aftermath of Carney's murder.

They condemn such violence, they said.

The forum did post a letter of sympathy and support to Carney's family on their social media, he said.

And, a few days after the murder of Carney, the new group met with the Jordanian ambassador to brainstorm ways to magnify shared history and understanding with Irish people, Alkalalbeh said. 

They decided to go back to basics – to organise to meet up and talk to people, feel the kinship of each other’s company and show they’re not boogeymen but ordinary guys who try their best and enjoy gabbing, good food and hanging out with friends.

Their first big plan is an event slated for 19 September in a Co. Tipperary town that, the folkloric story goes, holds fragments of Jordan.

Goin' down to the River Jordan 

Clogh Shiúrdáin, or Cloughjordan in English, means “Stone of Jordan”.

One origin story of the town's name is that a few centuries into the Anglo-Norman reign over Ireland, De Marisco, an Anglo-Norman knight, went on a Crusade and brought back a stone from the River Jordan to lay on his castle in present-day Cloughjordan, which led to its name.

Since 2019, a sculpture also stands on Main Street in Cloughjordan shaped with a stone from the River Jordan – where the Christ was baptised, said Ghreiz – to mark closeness between the two countries.

In recent years, people in both Jordan and Cloughjordan have been building relations and companionship, around the story of the memento from the River Jordan.

In 2019, the Nenagh Guardian reported that 30 people from the Cloughjordan village travelled to Jordan in search of sameness in things that looked different. 

“In a world where important political leaders pursue polarisation and fear of the 'other', the Cloughjordan community trip at its heart embraces cultural curiosity and the sharing of values and culture between peoples of faraway places,” said the article.

Again last year, “a large group from the Friends of Archaeology and Heritage of Jordan (FoAH) visited Cloughjordan as part of their Irish study group tour”, the paper reported.

Kind to each other 

Daggamseh, who has worked in Arabic-language media for the past nine years, said he got involved in the new forum's committee to offer his media skills.

They have already made a promo video in Arabic and need to make an English one, they said.

At the gathering, attendees will be able to taste Jordanian cuisine like mansaf, a Jordanian dish made with slow-cooked lamb, rice and a yoghurt sauce called jameed, said Alkalalbeh.

They plan to share souvenirs from Jordan, too. Like the sea mud that’s good for the skin. Alfanatseh smiled and pulled up the product on his phone.

Alkalalbeh kept stressing that the group is paying for the event out of their own pockets. No groups or charities subsidise it, he said.

The forum's future plans include donating blood as another effort to show their goodwill towards Irish people, Alkalalbeh said.

Aren’t they thinking that they shouldn’t have to go to such lengths to be embraced? And that people who are demonising them right now aren’t going to change their minds anyway?

Alfanatseh said he is sure that trying to grow closer to people and showing kindness works, sometimes even on people with calcified views.  

“I have a friend who was racist to me when I came here,” he said.

When they got to know each other, said Alfanatseh, his attitude shifted. They’re good friends now, he said.