Standing together against Direct Provision

MINISTER for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Roderic O’ Gorman was right when he described direct provision as “expensive, inefficient… ill-equipped to respond to shifting trends in international migration” and failing “to respect the dignity and human rights of individuals…”.

He wrote these words in the foreword to the White Paper on Ending Direct Provision published in February, 2021.

The failures of the direct provision system and our broken asylum process have been spoken and written about extensively. 

Over the years many readers will have heard of the poor living conditions, lack of nutritious food, lack of mental health supports and years kept in limbo by an asylum process plagued by delays.

Even today, just under half of the residents of direct provision have no access to their own cooking facilities. In practice, this means that of the approximately 1,700 children living in centres across Ireland, many will never have seen their parents prepare a meal or tasted their family’s traditional cooking.

This is why refugee and migrant rights organisations have come together to form STAD – Standing Together Against Direct Provision. STAD is a coalition dedicated to ensuring that the Government meets its commitments to creating a new reception system for international protection applicants (asylum seekers) by 2024. Knowing the harm that the system of direct provision has caused over the 23 years of its existence, we will not let the plans in the White Paper gather dust on a shelf.

The founding members of STAD all individually welcomed the plans outlined in the White Paper at the time of its publication last year. It was momentous. However, in the year that has passed, daily life has barely changed for the majority of people living in our asylum process. Change has been slow and hard-fought. Despite the Government committing to passing legislation to allow asylum seekers to access driving licences by summer 2021, that right was eventually only achieved through litigation in the High Court late last year.

The Government have also fallen short on plans to end emergency accommodation. Emergency accommodation centres offer few of the very basic supports that even traditional direct provision centres have and are a disaster from both an economic point of view and a human rights perspective.

The Government was criticised by the Public Accounts Committee last week for its reliance on them. The White Paper undertook to move away from emergency accommodation by the end of 2021, however the Public Accounts Committee report that there are still 27 emergency centres open. One of STAD’s first priorities is that these emergency centres must be closed.

Many of the problems we associate with the direct provision system are rooted in the delays in the asylum application process. Our most recent figures show that from the time of entry to the State, the median time for a person with a non-prioritised application to receive a first decision on their case is 24 months. The majority of people will not have received legal advice on their applications at this stage, which means cases unsuccessful at the first stage are often overturned at the appeal stage. The median time for an appeal to be heard is about 10 months. However, from working directly with asylum seekers in Cork and beyond, we regularly meet people waiting far in excess of 34 months for a final decisions.

It is hard to explain how these delays affect those waiting.

Can you imagine spending almost three years of your life not knowing if you would be forced to return to a country where you believe your life is at risk? Obsessively checking the post every day for news that either a weight has been lifted from your shoulders and life can begin again, or the dreaded news of a deportation order.

For many Irish people, the last two years living with Covid-19 restrictions have felt interminable. While we can understand rationally why we must make sacrifices, it has felt as though our lives are on pause and the future is uncertain. This is a taste of what being in our uncertain asylum system is like. In order for the plans to end direct provision to work, these processing times must be reduced to no more than six months at each stage. It’s hard to see what, if any progress, has been made towards this end in the past year but this is something that STAD will be actively monitoring and campaigning on.

As STAD we believe the argument about direct provision is over – it is clear that it must end and must end without delay. However, wishing does not make it so and the hard work of ensuring that the 44 direct provision centres and 27 emergency centres across Ireland are closed is far from over.

As STAD we will hold the Government to account and we’re inviting everyone who agrees that it’s time for direct provision to end to join our movement.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fiona Finn is CEO of Nasc. Nasc is one of the founding members of STAD. Its members also include MASI, Crosscare, Immigrant Council of Ireland, Irish Refugee Council, DORAS, Amnesty International Ireland and Cultur.