Lock up asylum seekers? Teachers prove we are a lot better than that

I SPENT last weekend meeting and talking to primary school principals.

They were in Killarney for their annual conference and spent all their time talking about things of professional interest and importance. These are people whose commitment to our education system is total, and their interest is in seeing how they can make it better.

Each year they pick a theme designed to reflect the current social and economic atmosphere in the country at large. This year, it was Changing Ireland, and what they discussed throughout the weekend was the impact of race.

To be more specific, they discussed the needs of people who have come from all over the world to raise their families in Ireland and the challenges to which that gives rise.

The principals of our national schools, in a real sense, are at the coalface of this issue. When I was going to school — indeed when my children were in first and second-level education — schools consisted almost entirely of Irish children. I remember in my own Leaving Cert year a boy coming to our school who was English and — most shocking of all — Protestant.

The biggest impact it made on us, I’m afraid to say, was that we were all incredibly envious of the fact that while we had religious knowledge class, he was allowed to kick a ball around the yard outside.

In the wink of an eye, all that has changed utterly.

Now there are schools in Ireland where more than 50 languages are spoken and where every skin colour under the rainbow can be found. The number of English language support teachers has increased by a multiple of five in five years, and it’s still not enough.

There are substantial issues of integration and an unacceptable number of instances of bullying and discrimination. Teachers face cultural challenges in relation to issues like discipline, never mind teaching methods.

And yet the prevailing sense I got from the debates that took place, and from talking to individual teachers, was one of excitement. Nervous excitement, but excitement nevertheless. The experience of teaching has been transformed by the arrival of a dozen different ways of looking at the world around us.

Classrooms can be more exciting and vibrant places. It can be a hugely rewarding experience for teachers to watch young people settle in, begin to grow in confidence and start to hit the high hurdles that our education system can put before them.

None of them will say they don’t need help, or that it’s easy. But you come away from meeting them with a strong sense of the ‘worthwhileness’ of it, the notion that they are facing something new and different — and leading in the creation of something new and different as well. National schoolteachers and their principals today are helping to shape an Ireland that will be radically different. And certainly as far as the principals are concerned, “we can do it” is the message that’s coming across.

I came home from the conference invigorated by the professionalism and commitment I saw there, and also by a sense that a key group of people was getting ahead of the game in beginning to address the issues thrown up by the ‘new Ireland’.

Isn’t it funny that we have spent so many years talking about the new Ireland that will be produced by peace and reconciliation between North and South, and that in fact the impact of a huge influx of different cultures is likely to produce far more change in the way we look at the world in the future?

And almost the first thing I read when I got home was the news that the Government is apparently considering the introduction of a network of detention centres for asylum seekers believed to be making false claims of persecution in their homeland. Note that phrase — the detention centres are for people “believed to be” making false claims, not for people established as making false claims.

What proportion of asylum seekers are “believed” by the system to be making false claims — “cock and bull stories” as the Minister for Justice put it some time ago? The answer is — most of them. These detention centres, therefore, are likely to be used for almost anyone who comes to Ireland claiming asylum.

AND what is a detention centre? It’s a place where you are locked up without a trial. Your crime is that you are applying to one of the richest countries in the world, with a proud humanitarian record, for help and succour. So you, and any children you bring with you, will be locked in a camp until a decision is made about your future. And locked up is not an exaggeration. The camp to which you’re sent may be on the outskirts of a town, but you will never be allowed to visit the town. Detention means simply that you will be behind locked gates.

We already have a number of ‘accommodation’ centres for asylum seekers in Ireland. We never talk about them, and I’ve never seen an RTÉ camera roam around them, but they are not happy places, not places that this rich and hospitable country can afford to be proud of. Now we’re going to add detention centres to the accommodation centres. Why do we need to shame ourselves in this way?

The numbers of people seeking asylum in Ireland is falling steadily and little by little we are getting to grips with the multicultural challenges that economic immigration has brought in its wake. There is no need whatever to make the situation facing asylum seekers even more oppressive than it is already.

As things stand right now, under what is usually referred to as the “direct provision” regime, people looking for asylum in Ireland are supplied with food and clothing and a pocket money allowance of less than €20 a week.

They live a form of apartheid. Adults are not allowed to work or study, and many children are not allowed to mix with children who live here.

Asylum seekers in direct provision are not even allowed cook their own food, a restriction that can cause horrible and unnecessary suffering.

We tell them to integrate, but in most cases deny them access to English classes. We give them no child benefit and we actively discourage contact with the local communities beside which asylum seekers live.

That’s the system that pertains now. And even though the numbers are dropping, we are proposing to make life even harder by introducing detention centres. I’ve been trying, ever since I started writing this piece, to prevent myself from calling these places concentration camps.

But I find it almost impossible to believe anyone is seriously trying to find ways to make life more cruel for people whose crime is they want to live in Ireland.

How many times do we have to learn the lessons about abuse of the most vulnerable? We cannot — we must not — allow these callous, uncivilised and unnecessary detention centres to be built in our country. We are better than that.