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A family divided: ‘We didn’t say a proper goodbye that morning’

A Galway-based woman whose husband was deported wants him to be allowed to return

Marese McDonagh

Vahram Harutyunyan missed his daughter’s fourth birthday party in Galway on Thursday because they have been separated for almost a year.

On August 15th last year the Armenian-born barber, who has lived in Irelandfor almost 13 years, was deported, leaving his wife, Viktoria Gagkaeva, and their Irish-born daughter, Alina, behind .

He had gone to Dublin for a regular appointment at the offices of the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service but shortly after arrival was arrested and within 24 hours was on a flight to Armenia.

Gagkaeva says apart from a five-minute phone call when he was surrounded by gardaí, he never got a chance to say goodbye to his family. After being detained, his phone was taken from him, he was put in prison and then put on a flight in the early hours of the following morning, she says. “I got a voicemail at 4am saying he was on the flight. There were four gardaí with him, sitting alongside him in the back of the plane. He said he felt like a murderer.”

She breaks down when she recalls how she tried to make sense of that five-minute call when her world fell apart as her husband apologised for having to leave her alone with their child.

“We didn’t say a proper goodbye that morning as he was late and ran out the door, saying ‘My God I will miss the bus’ ”, she recalls. Her husband had for three years regularly signed on at the immigration service office on Burgh Quay in Dublin, having sought legal advice about how to regularise his situation.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/a-family-divided-we-didn-t-say-a-proper-goodbye-that-morning-1.3974621

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