The Nation's Great Disgrace

There are times when you despair of people. Of Irish people I mean. Reports at the weekend confirmed that Ireland has the EU’s lowest rate of granting refugee status to applicants. So far this year, according to a new report, the Government, meaning the Department of Justice, has made just 14 positive recommendations out of a total of 1,014 cases. Just a fraction over one out of every hundred applicants has been granted refugee status this year.

These astonishing figures are contained in a statistics report from the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner. And no one at official level seems even the remotest bit embarrassed. On the contrary…
Now I had no idea that things were quite that bad, that as a country, and a society, we had descended to the pit where this sort of statistic could be worn as a badge of honour. But apparently that’s where we find ourselves.
Speaking to the Irish Times, the Department of Justice claimed that the Irish asylum system compared with the best in the world “in terms of fairness, decision making, determination structures and support services for asylum seekers.”
So the system that produces the least number of successful applications is deemed to be the fairest. In terms of double-speak, truly someone is living back in 1984.
Another earlier EU-wide study was almost as damning. In 2009 – the good old days! – Ireland made proportionately fewer positive decisions to give protection to asylum seekers than any other EU country apart from Greece. But that only tells a small part of the story. If you were second lowest in a tightly packed group, and figures everywhere were in the same general region, that would be one thing. But in Britain 26.9% of applications are successful, in Germany 36.5% and in Denmark 47.9% “at first instance” – in other words without the asylum seekers having to undertake an appeal. In the same year, our average acceptance rate, even after appeals, was just 6%. That is, an asylum seeker has eight times a greater likelihood of being accorded refugee status in Denmark.
If it didn’t make you sick, you’d have to laugh. There we were just a few years ago, high on our ludicrous collective self-importance, convinced that Ireland was the hottest place in Europe for asylum seekers to head. There was talk of floodgates being opened. Newspapers and huckster councillors drummed up hostility to people of a dark-skinned hue. Politicians bought into it. They were coming here to sponge on our far too generous welfare system, we were told. The brasher economic commentators said their piece as well. And so on it went: the benefits of the Irish economic miracle weren’t to be shared with interlopers after all. If you had any kind of heart, and a modicum of sympathy with ordinary people in distress, it was bile-inducing stuff. But the bigotry took hold.
A climate was successfully engendered in which instinctively conservative Ministers and officials could go into clampdown mode. Immigration officers are members of the Gardaí. The force has never been noted for either its sensitivity or its commitment to equality or, in Northern parlance, ‘parity of esteem’. There are those who believe that the training of Gardaí on issues to do with equality, racism and asylum protection is grossly inadequate. There is a feeling, indeed, among people of a liberal or leftist disposition, that a huge level of prejudice exists among Gardaí – against minorities, foreigners, people that look a little bit different – and that rather than being curtailed, this is subliminally encouraged by attitudes at the top and in particular by the wider drift towards authoritarianism in Irish political culture, and the parallel erosion of civil and human rights here.
What we are seeing now is the result. As of 2010, we are demonstrably more interested in turfing-out people who come here to seek asylum than anyone else in Europe. But even while they are here, waiting for their cases to be heard, what do we do? We refuse to allow them to work. We pack them into whatever unsuitable accommodation amuses us. We give them an insulting pittance to live on – and threaten to take it off them if they so much as open their beaks.
I’m not joking. The recent decision, taken by the so called Reception and Integration Agency – another grotesque Orwellian flourish there – to transfer 111 asylum seekers from Mosney to alternative accommodation, mainly Hatch Hall in the centre of Dublin, at short notice and without consultation, was typical of the way the State does its business in this area.
And what if they refused to go? The RIA has said that they will not remove people forcibly – after all, scenes of asylum seekers being dragged kicking and screaming from Mosney wouldn’t be good for the Reception and Integration Agency’s homely image. Rather, a representative of the agency threatened that it can stop payment of the weekly stipend of €19.10 (generous, what?) to anyone who causes trouble.
And so it goes. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees is understandably deeply concerned not just about the figures but about the treatment of asylum seekers generally. There seems to be a determination among officers of the State to strip those who do apply for protection of their dignity, disempower them, make their lives as miserable as possible, tie them up in legal knots – there is no recourse to legal aid when applications are made in “the first instance” – and generally do enough that is unpleasant, unsympathetic and plain bullying, to make them want to disappear.
Ireland. This country of fucking emigrants. With a diaspora of 50 or 60 million, or so we claim. So many of them illegals when they landed on foreign shores. People who were fucked out of here during the Great Famine. People who were politically repressed, discriminated against, hounded and vilified and transported.
And this is how, in the land of a thousand welcomes, we treat those who come to Ireland for refuge. It is pitiful, small-minded, utterly lacking in compassion, a disgrace, a stain on the integrity of the country and its citizens.
Something must be done to take the power from the hands of the people who are currently wielding it. But I don’t rightly know what right now. I don’t rightly know what.