European boxing champion Gabriel Dossen and his mother Meserk Moti with the gold medal he won at the EUBC Elite Men’s European Championships. Photo: Ray Ryan
European boxing champion Gabriel Dossen. Photo: Ray Ryan
European boxing champion Gabriel Dossen and his mother Meserk Moti with the gold medal he won at the EUBC Elite Men’s European Championships. Photo: Ray Ryan
Blown by the winds of war to a refugee camp in the Ivory Coast, a young African woman gave birth to a boy in that camp and in her bid for safety would land on a distant shore many thousands of miles from home.
That boy is now 22 and is Ireland’s newly-minted European middleweight amateur boxing title-holder. Ten days ago Gabriel Dossen returned to Galway from Armenia with his gold medal, his champion’s belt and his journey towards the Paris Olympics right on track.
He doesn’t remember his life in the refugee camp. Galway city has been his home for the last 20 years. It is his mother who does. Meserk Moti was one of the many random casualties of ethnic conflict in her homeland. She was herself not much older than a child when she became another pilgrim among the unnamed masses of migrants seeking sanctuary around the globe.
In her case, it was sanctuary from the long-running strife between Ethiopian government forces and an independence movement in the Oromia region. Oromia is one of the nine regional states that constitute the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. With an estimated population of 35 to 38 million and a land area of over 136,000 square miles, it is the largest state in the federation demographically and geographically. The Oromo people are by far the largest ethnic group within the state; the language they speak is also called Oromo; the Oromo diaspora is spread across Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, among other African nations. The capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa (Finfinne in Oromo) is situated within the state.
Historical resistance in Oromia to assimilation under Ethiopian rule has been compounded by generational grievances about discrimination in politics, law, policing, local government, jobs and land by other major ethnic groupings, the Amhara and Tigreans. In a country fragmented by a multiplicity of tribes and languages, and destabilised by constant ethnic tensions and economic hardship, political volatility is seemingly embedded in the culture too.
In Oromia, various armed insurgencies have been active since the 1960s. Violence between state forces and Oromo militants has been erupting intermittently for decades. The Oromo Liberation Army has been accused repeatedly of acts of terrorism, not least the murder of innocent Amhara civilians. Government crackdowns in return have been savage and indiscriminate.
In May 2020 a report by Amnesty International was explicit in its conclusions. “Ethiopian security forces,” it stated, “committed horrendous human rights violations including burning homes to the ground, extrajudicial executions, rape, arbitrary arrests and detentions, sometimes of entire families, in response to attacks by armed groups and inter-communal violence in Amhara and Oromia.” These incidents happened, the report said, between December 2018 and December 2019.
And they were happening when Meserk Moti was a girl too. Speaking in her Galway home ten days ago, her eyes well up as she recounts in her broken English those distressing times. First she clarifies her identity. “Originally I am from Ethiopia, [but] I can’t say I’m Ethiopian, I’m from Oromia ... We are the people who want to be independent ... It’s a country, actually, within Ethiopia, [it’s] just [that] back in the days they brought all of them [different ethnic regions] under one place.”
This century-long drive towards consolidation under one flag and one national government just hasn’t worked, she says. “One language, one blood, one everything, they just want to have one, but that has never worked for 150 years, all this [time] Ethiopia has existed, so that is why the western [governments] don’t want to talk much about it because also they just want one Ethiopia.”
So what do the Oromo want?
“They want to be independent, self-determine and self-rule because we are deprived the language, we are deprived who we are and what we have in the land we’re not really equal share, we don’t have any share in the country.”
The federal arrangement has never worked, she claims, because for example when “the Tigreans were in power, it’s only their people have been the — all the good things and all the jobs and all this things ... so, central rule, it’s not equal.”
Her family was involved in the independence movement and inevitably became swept up in the turmoil. “Some of them passed away, some of them flee, some of them in prison, I have a lot of friends, family who’s in prison because you can’t say nothing ... you can’t say nothing ... I just become emotional talking [about] this.”
She gathers herself and continues. “You cannot say [anything] against the government, you have to do everything — you have to be slave actually, then you can live, but if you say no and that’s [when you will be] killed or you be in prison and anybody can come and take what you have, you know?”
Her father was in prison for 17 years. When he was released he had to leave for another city “because of the fighting between the government and the rebels” and “as he was going [to] the city the car turned over and he die.” She was four at the time. Her mother then had to flee and leave her children behind with their grandmother.
Aged 14 or 15, she took the decision to leave her home town with a group of young people and embark on an epic journey to the Ivory Coast, some 6,600 kilometres away.
“We left in the group and some of them die on the road and some of them go to other countries ... At that time it was easier [to go to the Ivory Coast] because the person who was taking us, it was much easier [for him].”
After many weeks on the road, she ended up in the refugee camp in Abidjan. Meserk’s recollection of the calendar dates is hazy but she thinks she was in the camp for a couple of years. There, she met and fell in love with a young man from Liberia. They decided to head for the Liberian capital, Monrovia, but it too was dangerous with war. “So we had to come back and by that time I was pregnant and then I had him [Gabriel] in the camp.”
Massive ships were regularly arriving and departing from the port in Abidjan. Her partner had a small business bringing fish and other commodities to the local markets. And he knew some people there. “So we pay a small thing to those people and then they hide us inside [the ship], we stay there for a month, I’m not so sure how long, we hide in there, down in the bottom. And then maybe every two or three days they bring for us something to eat, and sometimes nothing.”
It is Meserk and her baby alone in the bowels of this ship; her partner has gone ahead on a different ship. They have no idea where the ship is going to dock, beyond knowing that it’s headed for somewhere in Europe. She knew nothing about Ireland.
“We never [knew] we’d be coming to Ireland, we just want to get out of there, it was just our luck that the ship is coming here. It’s in Dublin port.” But she doesn’t know she’s in Dublin port. She just knows that it has landed somewhere. So she makes her way up through the interior of the vessel, babe in arms, and finds herself in this strange city. It is 2002. She sees an African chap and asks him some questions. He tells her there’s an African market in the city centre, “and all the black people, they meet there.”
European boxing champion Gabriel Dossen. Photo: Ray Ryan
She goes to the market and there’s an internet shop where people can make international calls. Someone gives her the address for the relevant office where she can present herself as an asylum seeker. Their details are registered at the office and mother and baby are transferred to the reception centre in Balseskin, north Dublin. They stay there for a number of weeks before being transferred to another centre in Kildare.
The months go by. She has been reunited with her partner by then. They are invited to a children’s birthday party by a friend of the family living in Galway. They travel down by train from Kildare and upon arrival, Meserk has an epiphany. “I get down from the train, I walk to Eyre Square and I see Galway and I felt like I’m home!” How come? “It’s a sunny day, it’s beautiful, and I see the green [of Eyre Square] and I see the grass and I see the people and everybody look happy and I feel like home, I feel the smell of home.”
This was coming into the summer of 2003. And her epiphany had an uncanny prescience because they stayed in Galway for the night and the next day her solicitor called with some news: ‘You’ve been granted refugee status.’ “And I never go back! We start looking for a house here.”
They found a house in Knocknacarra and the same suburb has been their home for the last 20 years. Four more children followed. Aaron is currently a member of the Galway United academy squad while younger sister Eve is an Ireland soccer youth international.
Meserk has been bringing them up as a single mother for the last 11 years. She found work as a kitchen porter, then in a café, and now in a community care centre. It has been a long, hard struggle trying to make her way in a society that she didn’t know, without a network of family and friends.
Gabriel went to national school in Shantalla on Galway’s west side and then to St Mary’s College for secondary school. He was a natural sportsman. Starting out in Taekwondo and kickboxing, he quickly joined Salthill Devon for soccer and St Michael’s for GAA whilst also competing in athletics and swimming. “I was training every day of the week,” he recalls, “if there was a training session to be at, I was there.”
He first laced up gloves in Furbo boxing club, near Spiddal, under the tutelage of the late John Cahill. His mother was happy to see him so immersed in all of his sport, boxing included, despite its inherent danger. The people involved in it were so good to him, she says, it put her mind at ease.
“He was lucky when he was in Furbo,” says Meserk, “there are [a] few internationals who help him, who see potential in him, two or three different coaches who just come there to see him, just when he was 12, 13, and they always talk good about him. And John Cahill was looking after him [like] an eggshell, always telling me he [Gabriel] can do [great things]. [John] was driving him everywhere, he loved him, he really loved him.”
At 16, he transferred to the Olympic boxing club in the city where he has been mentored ever since by head coach Mike Mongan. Lisa O’Rourke, the Castlerea fighter who won gold at the world championships in Istanbul three weeks ago, is also coached there by Mongan. In moving to Olympic, Dossen decided to go all in on boxing. He quit his other sporting commitments. He was still 16 when he won the national U18 title at light welter in August 2016. It meant he was automatically selected for the world youth championships in St Petersburg the following November, where he won three fights. His international career was up and running. He was brought into Irish boxing’s high performance unit at the national sports campus in Abbotstown.
In February 2019 the southpaw won his first national elites title but sustained a serious knee injury in the process. It left him in rehab for most of a year and derailed his hopes for the Tokyo Olympics. Unusually for most full-time amateurs in his sport, Dossen managed to stick with the books too. He completed his Leaving Cert and “did decent enough” points wise, despite having missed three months of his final year because of his training commitments. He then did two years at Galway Technical Institute, studying business and accounting, before transferring to Athlone IT where he will complete his final exams in August after three years studying business.
Standing six foot two, he is relatively comfortable making the 75kg middleweight threshold. But as of now there is no middleweight class pencilled in for the Paris Olympics in 2024. The situation is still fluid but Dossen thinks he may have to move up to 80kg where he will be meeting heavier, stronger opponents, some of them dropping down from 86 or 87kg. Nevertheless, he has only one vision for Paris, assuming he qualifies: “Gold”.
Between now and then, much of his life will consist of the weekly journey from Galway to Abbotstown and back to Galway again, doing his Tuesday-to-Friday training blocks with the high performance coaches and then heading out to tournaments and box cups in England, Europe and further afield.
Financially it has been a struggle, he says, especially during his college years when he was renting a house in Athlone. Full-time training means he can’t take a part-time job. And with four younger siblings at home, it’s a tight squeeze for his mother too. The IABA “pay for our stay up in Dublin for our meals and accommodation, but your own money, you still end up out of pocket.” In 2021 he received €8,000 in funding from Sport Ireland but fell between the cracks for 2022 and was left high and dry for this year. His European title means he should now be in line for the top-tier funding of €40,000. Their grant aid was a subject of conversation among the Ireland team in Armenia.
“Every time we were fighting we were thinking, two more fights, one more fight, we’ll get the pay day ... We were just talking among ourselves, get to the last eight, get to the last four, you’ve sorted yourself some money for next year.” But he was wary of this kind of talk too. “Because at the end of the day, it’s about performing. Instead if you’re saying I’m going in here fighting for 40 grand, I think it puts you maybe a bit back. You need to think you’re going in to fight and perform and win. And forget about the bonuses.”
It is basically, process first, reward second. “You’ve gotta love the sport,” he adds, “you’ve gotta love boxing. I can’t remember who said it but, it goes something like ‘If you’re in boxing to get paid, you won’t actually get paid’. You’ve got to be in it for the love of the sport and to go in there and win to be the man and then everything else is a bonus.”
Still, even a small stream of income would make life a lot easier over the next two years, he says. As long as it’s steady. That way, he might be able to get himself a car for the long round trip to Dublin and back every week. He’s had his provisional driving licence for the last four years or so and is now planning to get his full licence. But then there is the rising price of second-hand cars now, and petrol, and of course insurance. It would be a hefty financial commitment.
So, you suggest, a sponsored car would be nice? His eyes light up. “It would be lovely, wouldn’t it?” A bit of sponsorship in general would make a big difference. “It would help so much, it would help myself, it would help my family, it would take a load of the weight off.”
As our conversation concludes, Meserk gets ready to leave for work. She has lived two lives, the one in Ethiopia, the completely different one in Ireland. She and her baby survived. They managed to make safe sanctuary. But a new life here was the start of another long struggle. “It’s tough,” she says. “Yeah. It’s tough for so many things. But they are good kids, my kids, they’re very good. They are determined, they are humble, they love one another, they love God.”
