Asylum seekers crammed into open prison with mobile homes as cells

LAST week I wrote a column about a Government proposal to introduce a network of detention centres for asylum seekers.

This week I’m perplexed. Why do we need a network of detention centres? We already have them.

To all intents and purposes, we are already incarcerating anyone who comes to Ireland seeking refuge.

We put them in places that we don’t call detention centres, and we leave them there, sometimes for years.

What we actually call these places is direct provision accommodation centres. I went to look at one of them during the week, and I have to say I left the place shaking with rage.

The notion that we could treat families this way, and still call ourselves civilised, leaves me baffled.

I’ll describe what I saw later.

First of all, this is what the Department of Justice has to say about them.

In the department’s annual report last year, you can search from top to bottom without finding any description of how an accommodation centre is run, what it’s like to live in one, how human and family rights are protected, how sanity is maintained.

If you search hard enough on the department’s website you’ll find a value-for-money report that explains how further “efficiencies” can be generated in the treatment of asylum seekers. There is a helpful link on the department’s website that takes you to the official Reception and Integration Agency which is charged with the welfare of all asylum seekers.

In a variety of different languages on its site (www.rai.gov.ie), the agency sets out the rules for anyone seeking refuge here:

* Your photograph and fingerprints will be taken when you lodge your application.

* When your application for a declaration as a refugee has been lodged, you will be given accommodation in a reception centre in Dublin … for an initial period of 10 to 14 days.

* You will then be relocated under the ‘dispersal scheme’ to an accommodation centre outside Dublin. There are 58 such accommodation centres throughout the State and you will not be given any choice with regard to the location of the centre to which you are dispersed. You may have to share your bedroom with other asylum seekers.

* You will be expected to remain in the accommodation centre to which you are dispersed … You may only move from this accommodation with the permission of the Reception and Integration Agency.

* Your accommodation will be full board, ie, bed, breakfast, lunch and dinner.

* As your accommodation will be full board, the only income you will receive from the State shall be a personal allowance of €19.10 per week and, if you have children and they are accompanying you, €9.60 per week for each child.

* You will not be allowed to seek or enter employment while your application for refugee status is being processed.

* You will not be allowed to carry on any business, trade or profession while your application is being processed.

*You will not be entitled to third-level education or to vocational training while your application is being processed.

There are more such rules. In fact, the entire asylum process goes on for page after page.

If you want to apply, you’d better be familiar with the rules.

It will never be enough that you fit the definition of an asylum seeker (and you’re going to have a hell of a job persuading anyone in the system that you do, given the rejection rates).

That means you have to be willing to go where you’re sent and stay there, live on the paltry income you’re given, eat what’s provided for you and take your place in the queue for all sorts of essential health and welfare services.

Try to improve yourself through learning, and you’ve broken a fundamental rule. Try to augment your income and you’ve broken the rules.

Stay out overnight, get drunk once in a while, try to cook some of the food you’re used to at home, and you’ve broken the rules.

In short, if you want to seek asylum here, you must be willing to enter a prison.

I TOLD you earlier I went to see one of these centres last week. I didn’t know we had 58 of them. Did you? I knew about Mosney and one or two others. But there are no signposts to any of these places.

They’re not on bus routes or in the heart of any of our towns. They’re all located in places where a blind eye can be turned to them.

I won’t tell you where this particular centre is because I don’t want to stigmatise anyone.

They know I was there anyway because the uniformed security guard at the gate demanded my identity and purpose. I refused to tell him what I was doing there other than that I wanted to see it, and handed him my business card.

I thought at first he was going to refuse me entry, but he seemed to think better of it and let me through after he had taken down the registration number of my car. For some reason, it seems not only must asylum seekers be discouraged from coming and going, so must any Irish citizen with an interest.

It’s hard to describe this place. Imagine a caravan park, entirely surfaced in concrete, with about 150 smallish and identical mobile homes lined up in 15 rows of 10 to each row. They’re no more than about 20 feet apart and there’s nothing between them but concrete. No grass, no garden furniture, no playground or swings, no clothes lines.

Absolutely nothing but one mobile home after another.

Each is capable of accommodating a small living area which must function as sitting room, dining room and kitchen, a bathroom and two tiny bedrooms.

The entire area was spotless. Spotless and barren.

I don’t know whether the people who lived there or the numerous security guards who were patrolling while I was there took responsibility for the cleanliness. I can just imagine it being presented as a showcase, it was so clean and tidy.

There are 150 of these tiny mobile homes accommodating up to 300 families. The rule that says you may have to share your bedroom with other asylum seekers is literally, and liberally, applied.

There is no family privacy, no comfort, nowhere to allow your children to play, nowhere to sit and talk.

And many of the families have been there for years, the euphoria of initially arriving in Ireland long since replaced by despair, depression and a pervading sense of hopelessness and alienation. No community exists there. Just people in jail.

We, the people of Ireland, own these places.

Our money built them. But like so much else we don’t want to take responsibility for, we’ve ‘contracted out’ the management of these centres to the private sector.

Doesn’t that just say it all?