Imagine you have just been forced to flee from a war-torn region; from a poverty stricken State; or as a political enemy of a cruel regime. You are looking for refuge in a developed nation.

Now that you have made it to the free world, you might feel hopeful. You have just landed in Ireland, a country that prides itself on its welcoming reputation. What’s not to like?

A lot, as it turns out.

Since the dawn of this millennium, Ireland’s treatment of refugees has been worse that dismal. Asylum seekers who arrive here are treated as people without rights in a number of vital respects. Rather than being welcomed as potential citizens of the future, they are forced into a system called ‘direct provision’. Ostensibly, this is designed to provide welfare and accommodation for vulnerable people and their families while their asylum application is being dealt with. Instead, it has become a byword for the humiliation and nastiness to which refugees are almost routinely treated here.

So what does the term Direct Provision mean? For a start, refugees are placed in what are called Direct Provision centres – essentially cheap, institutional accommodation with poor quality facilities and a sickening lack of privacy. The inmates live in generally cramped, often sub-standard or unsuitable conditions.

Refugees channelled into the system are given a derisory amount of spending money per week. Crucially, they cannot work; nor can they officially attend a university or college. In effect their human potential is completely suppressed and they are forced simply to hang around like extras in a B-movie, at the pleasure of the State. If that was for a few weeks, it would be bad. In practice, however, it is for endless years...

INFESTATION PROBLEMS

For the adults involved, it is deeply demoralising. But the system also undermines them horribly in front of their own children. What sort of an example are they giving to the young ones they love – through no fault of their own? By any objective standard, their treatment by the State is inhumane and degrading.

And yet, no one seems to give a shit. So determined are those in charge of public policy not to ‘encourage’ asylum-seekers to come to Ireland that this limbo-land status goes on, and on, and on...

According to the latest figures, there are about 4,400 people living in Direct Provision centres across the country, and about a third of these have been in the system for three years or more. Seeing someone stuck in a centre for 5-8 years in not uncommon.

South African Lucky Khambule spent four years in the Kinsale Road accommodation centre. It had such an impact on him that he became an activist, advocating for those who still remain ‘inside’.

Khambule says the Kinsale centre was a desperately lonely place. “I found it to be very isolated,” he recalls. “It had no community around it, and no shop to even walk to – it was hidden. It was very hard to even see that there were people living there – and inside obviously it was so controlled. We were supposed to report every morning to mark the register that we were present. It felt really oppressive to be treated in that way.”

Jennifer DeWan works with NASC, the Irish immigrant support centre. “The quality of life under Direct Provision varies from centre to centre,” she acknowledges. “The best ones are not unlike everyday apartments that supply inhabitants with their own kitchen – which at least provides them with the agency to cook for themselves.”

Other centres, however, are thoroughly dismal. “They are old convents or buildings that have a lot of damp and infestation problems. They have really old draughty, windows – things that would making living conditions in those centres bad for people.”

BRUTAL BUREAUCRACY

These conditions can have seriously adverse affects on the mental health of those who are living there.

“People coming in have already gone through potentially traumatic situations before they arrive,” Jennifer DeWan explains. “Then they’re put into a system where you’re given no privacy, no autonomy. You’re not in control anymore of your own life – and there is no end to that. It feels interminable. I think the limbo that people find themselves in, on top of not having the right to work, it’s really bad for people’s heads. There are definitely high levels of depression and anxiety.”

For Lucky, the sense of crippling inertia took it’s toll. “You get raspy, you get anxious,” he says. “You feel that your wings are clipped, that you can’t do anything. It affects your head. You have to be really strong in Direct Provision to be able to cope.” He’d have gone completely stir crazy if he hadn’t got involved politically. “That was the only way that I could cope,” he says. “Without that I would have been rotting there, with nothing to do. It was the system that forced me into activism.” Inevitably, the cruelly extended period people are forced to spend in these centres also makes it harder for ex-residents to be assimilated, once they do leave. The longer you are institutionalised, the harder it is to function afterwards.

“I had a four-year gap in my life,” Lucky says, “but other people can have seven, eight, ten years.”

Here is what it comes down to: after they arrive in Ireland, people who have been victims of brutal regimes can in effect be imprisoned for up to ten years. In this way, huge chunks of their adult lives are being stolen from them. It is an outrageous way for a Government and a people to treat individuals and families who come here in hope – only to founder on the brutal rocks of Irish bureaucracy. Which is why we must end direct provision.

“It is something that will forever stay with you,” Lucky says, “whether you do get residency in the long run or not. The invisible scars that have been created by institutional life will never be repaired.”