ON 15 SEPTEMBER 2014, defiant asylum seekers blocked the entrance at Kinsale Road Direct Provision centre – preventing staff from getting in to do their work. That marked the beginning of a lockout lasting 10 days.
Asylum seekers in other Direct Provision centres joined in the action to protest against the system.
Top on their list of grievances was the prolonged institutionalisation with no end in sight. Many asylum seekers had spent more than five years in the system, with some spending as much as a decade in limbo.
Back then, successive governments had maintained, and passionately defended, the ban on the right to work, arguing that it would attract more asylum seekers to Ireland. Adult asylum seekers received a weekly allowance of €19.10. Amongst their complaints was that their enforced state of idleness, with little control over minor and major aspects of their lives, had a detrimental impact on their mental health.
Asylum-seeking children were effectively subjected to state-sponsored poverty – having been stripped of access to the child benefit when the system of Direct Provision was rolled out in the year 2000.
Their parents were expected to get them ready for school and not be able to take them to school as the Direct Provision centre bus would do that.
Back-to-school expenses served as a harsh annual reminder of their impoverishment as ordinary people across Ireland pitched in to donate essential supplies.
The protests in Kinsale Road garnered a lot of media coverage around the plight of asylum seekers in Direct Provision.
In response, the government announced that a working group had been established by the Minister for Justice to look into Direct Provision and to recommend changes to both the protection process and the reception system. The one thing the group was not going to do is look for alternatives to the Direct Provision system.
In the same year, a mother and her child took the government to court claiming the Direct Provision system breached their fundamental human rights. In pre-litigation letters, the Department of Justice vehemently defended Direct Provision and suggested that if the mother found conditions in Direct Provision to be intolerable, she can find her own accommodation (with no right to work) or leave Ireland.
The legal challenge did not succeed, but the High Court did find that some of the house rules of the State’s asylum seeker accommodation network were unlawful.
However, the High Court in Northern Ireland refused to allow the UK government to use EU law to send a family back to Dublin for their asylum claim to be processed in the Republic. The court ruled in 2013 that it would not be in the best interest of the child to send them back to Dublin where they’d likely end up in the Direct Provision system.
Ever since, the criticism against Direct Provision has persisted, led by asylum seekers themselves with the formation of the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI) in 2014.
In doubt
For all its spin, the government has always been slow to respond to the plight of asylum seekers, if they respond at all.
When the working group that was established after the protests in 2014 concluded its work with a report in 2015, the government cherry-picked which recommendations to implement. The group had recommended that asylum seekers be allowed to work and for the weekly allowance to be increased from €19.10 to €38.80.
The government refused to allow asylum seekers to work and fought against this in the courts where they lost to an asylum-seeking man who had spent eight years in Direct Provision without the right to work. And the weekly allowance was only brought to the working group’s recommendation of €38.80 in March 2019.
There was hope that things would get better last year when the government committed to ending the system of Direct Provision.
They promised to be guided by the Catherine Day Advisory Group report on what changes were needed.
The group made a series of recommendations and the government watered down the ones it did not agree with.
On the right to work, the group had regard for people who were still deprived of the right to work even after the successful Supreme Court challenge. The group proposed that all asylum seekers who had not received a final decision on their asylum claims and had been in the system for at least three months should be granted the right to work.
The government refused to do that. The government also turned down calls from the Irish Refugee Council and other groups who urged the state to increase the weekly allowance to €58.80 during the pandemic.
While the commitment to end Direct Provision was met with excitement from asylum seekers and campaigners, much of that fanfare has slowly turned into despair.
News that more than 4000 asylum seekers are waiting for interviews to assess their asylum claims have cast doubt on December 2024 commitment in the White Paper on Ending Direct Provision.
The State still has no legally binding deadline on how long asylum seekers should wait for a first instance decision. The question on everyone’s mind is what does the government intend to do with the thousands of people in Direct Provision today.
The Catherine Day Advisory Group had recommended that asylum seekers who had been in the system for two years or longer by the end of 2020 should be given permission to settle in Ireland in order to reduce the backlog prior to the rollout of the new system that is proposed in the White Paper.
The government has not committed to implementing that recommendation, further diminishing hope for change. The running joke amongst asylum seekers is that Transport Minister Eamon Ryan might give asylum seekers bicycles instead of access to driving licence as per commitment in the programme for the government.
Because after a year since that commitment, asylum seekers are still not allowed to drive. As the wheels of the bureaucracy turn ever so slowly towards the promised land, fear is that the deadline set for ending Direct Provision won’t be met.
And this is because the two larger parties in government and the civil service have never been interested in ending Direct Provision. It was at the insistence of the Greens that the negotiated programme for government included a commitment to end Direct Provision.
The upcoming budget should provide a clear indication of things to come for asylum seekers as much capital expenditure is required for phasing out Direct Provision.
For now, the limbo continues for thousands of asylum seekers stuck in the system with no idea of when they’ll get out.
Bulelani Mfaco is a spokesperson for the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland.
This work is co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work is the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.
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