Sir, - Anyone familiar with the current situation of asylum seekers and refugees in Ireland will not be surprised by the headlines (October 16th ) about the urban shelter crisis in the Dublin region and about the plans to disperse asylum seekers to other parts of Ireland.
To be fair, the Eastern Health Board has done much more than its share in providing housing and shelter for asylum applicants in Ireland. The other Boards, with the exception of the Mid-Western Board, have not had to deal with a comparable situation and have, by all accounts, resisted attempts to move towards an internal "burden-sharing" regime, just as Ireland as a country has resisted such an approach on the European level.
Asylum must not be confused with other forms of immigration, even if there is a common thread of lack of policy and lack of services running through the ad-hoc Irish approach to date. The right to seek asylum is guaranteed by international law and we are obliged as a State to provide assistance to asylum seekers; many have endured the most appalling suffering before arriving here. Those who come to Ireland are a small percentage of the overall numbers of asylum seekers in Europe and elsewhere, casualties of an ever-increasing tide of local wars, ethnic disputes, famines and simple destitution. We cannot solve all of these problems, nor is anyone asking us to, but as one of the world's wealthiest nations we are not bearing anything like our fair share.
The principle of dispersal is not unreasonable, but certain fundamentals need to be agreed beforehand. First, the service providers in each region, particularly the Health Boards, must be funded to handle the increased demand and must be given the additional training and facilities to deal with a situation with which they have not previously had to cope.
Second, asylum seekers cannot be shipped around the country like cattle. An earlier plan, proposed in all seriousness last April by the authorities and then shelved, would have seen asylum seekers dispatched with train tickets, maps and lists of bed and breakfasts, to places about which they knew nothing and where no proper reception services existed to provide for them. Best practice elsewhere takes account of the ethnic background of asylum seekers in arriving at decisions about where they should go and, crucially, it involves them in the decision-making process. We should do likewise here if dispersal is to succeed.
Third, asylum seekers must make extremely stressful and complex adjustments to a society that they do not know, whose culture they do not understand, and in which the official services, however welcome, are minimal. At the very least, they must be enabled to access help and advocacy services wherever they go in Ireland. At present the Irish Refugee Council only has a presence in two places, Dublin and Ennis. Funding is necessary for these services to be improved and to be extended to other places.
Fourth, the Taoiseach referred in his recent remarks in Finland to the "right to work" supposedly extended by the Government to asylum seekers. To my knowledge, as of last week, 12 persons have managed to avail of the scheme, due to its restrictive, bureaucratic and expensive character. This is not good enough.
Finally, it is apparently proposed that social welfare payments should be replaced by a voucher system. This is a complex issue, but it should be pointed out that, once again, we appear to be following the British lead here - never a good one in immigration matters - and that a voucher system is not only demeaning for asylum seekers themselves but is also inefficient and costly to administer.
In the medium term we need a much more fundamental debate about relations between natives and strangers in Irish society. Immigration is here to stay and we have much to learn and to gain from the presence of immigrants in our society. There is still much goodwill in official and public circles; it is not too late to develop sensitive and positive policies. I appeal for a positive debate about these issues. - Yours, etc.,
Piaras MacEinri,
Director, Irish Centre for Migration Studies, National University of Ireland, Cork