Archive for the ‘Ireland’ Category
Women in the asylum twilight zone
Susan (not her real name) was granted leave to remain in Ireland three weeks before she took her own life. An asylum seeker from Nigeria, Susan was the parent of Irish citizen children. After she had her last child in 2004 she broke her back and suffered severe mental health problems. Several of her children were taken into care and the family was moved from one direct provision hostel to another. Towards the end of her short life, the hostel wanted her to move out; Susan had difficulties finding accommodation and eventually found herself in a B & B where she ended her life on Friday 18 September.
Unlike many other women residents of Ireland’s direct provision hostels, which can only be described as holding centres, Susan never contacted AkiDwA, the Migrant Women’s Network, whose members counsel at least four women asylum seekers each day (however, her case was brought to AkiDwA’s notice). ‘The women we see are in a very bad state’, says AkiDwA’s national director Salome Mbugua. ‘There are many attempted suicides – every week brings new tragedies.’
Many women asylum seekers have been living in these holding direct provision centres on a paltry ‘comfort allowance’ of €19 per week (not raised since it was first introduced in 2001) for several years. AkiDwA has been interviewing women living in direct provision and compiling their experiences. Although most are doing their best to give their children a life, conditions are horrific. ‘Women tell us about having to share rooms with other families, often having no common language with them, having to share bathrooms with men, having no privacy, having no access to food preparation even while pregnant or breast feeding, and having no facilities to leave their children even for a short time, making their lives unbearable’, says Mbugua.
Living in these hostels is often unsafe; men often prowl around the hostels and sexually propositioning the women, and young single men living in the hostels often endanger the safety of teenage girls and women. According to a report in the Galway Advertiser last August, some of the women seen by the Galway Rape Crisis Centre have experienced gang rape in their own countries and are trying to re-establish their trust in the world. Aoibheann McCann of the GRCC says the women ‘are at risk of re-victimisation and are at the mercy of pimps and traffickers. Back in their own countries they could have been raped by police or military so they are very distrustful and reluctant to report crimes to Gardai… I can see another Ryan Report on direct provision in about 20 years time. These hostels and hotels are run by the private sector and people are making profits. If you’re going to keep people in institutions it should be the State running it themselves.’
Yet the horrific conditions in direct provision hostels, run by the Reception and Integration Agency, which often moves women asylum seekers to other hostels when they complain, casting them as ‘trouble makers’, are largely hidden from view. Post-boom Ireland has little interest in their plight. According to Mbugua the recession has led to increased racist attacks, as communities do not want to engage with asylum seekers: ‘The women AkiDwA has spoken to tell us they feel Irish people don’t want them… classes are often run separately for asylum seekers and Irish people.’
How many more people like Susan need to take their own lives before we begin to pay attention?
Racist attacks not just result of extreme right
Roma families given temporary shelter after racist attacks
When ‘post conflict’ Northern Ireland was dubbed by the BBC the ‘race hate capital of Europe’ in 2004, Robbie McVeigh’s analysis made the point that it was wrong to say, as many journalists did, that racism escalated simply because Protestants and Catholics had stopped fighting each other. Rather, McVeigh insisted, racism was not a new phenomenon in Northern Ireland, but was rather part of a legacy of intolerance built into Loyalist areas and into Unionism itself.
The racist violent attacks against a group of Romanian Roma in Belfast confirms McVeigh’s analysis that racism, rather than being the consequence of neo-Nazi BNP sympathisers – a claim made all too easily by Northern politicians including MLP Anna Lo (who by the way, as the only minority ethnic representative, received death threats because of her support for the Roma) – is built into northern Loyalism. It’s true that the attacks happened only a few weeks after the victory of the BNP in Britain’s European and local elections. It’s also true that both the UVF and the UDA denied their involvement with both the BNP and the attacks against the Roma families. Yet according to journalist Peter Geoghegan, the ‘Village’ area of Belfast, a run-down area of Loyalist terraces which became popular with eastern European migrants has seen many racist attacks of which the attacks on the Roma last week were only the most recent. Read the rest of this entry »
So what if she forged?
Pamela Izevbekhai with her children
I am writing this before the case has been decided and before we know whether a Nigerian mother who is seeking asylum in Ireland for herself and her daughters is allowed to remain in Ireland.
Much has been said about Pamela Izevbekhai’s case. Her recent admission, on the Marion Finnucane show, that her asylum claim was based on forged documents provided a dramatic turning point not only in her own case, but in the whole complex relations between the Irish state and African, particularly Nigerian, asylum seekers.
Equality aftermath
In the aftermath of the resignation of Niall Crowley, Chief Executive of the Equality Authority, the Minister for Justice made ‘no apologies’ for cutting the Equality Authority’s budget, privileging instead police spending. This is in line with seeing equality work as defending Irish society’s problematic marginal populations, rather than maintaining equality for all, which was what the EA was about.
Denying racism and declaring itself post- and anti-racist, Ireland, like other EU member states, in restricting immigration, limiting it to those migrants who are useful to ‘our way of life’, and castigating Travellers and poor people for not playing their part, particularly now that the economic boom is over.
Hidden Ireland … once again
At the AkiDwA (African Women’s Network) AGM on 22 November 2008, African asylum seekers living in direct provision hostels - AKA Ireland’s holding camps - spoke about the real cost of the recent budget cuts, as their children are prevented from attending school regularly because the school bus has been discontinued. The women, who live on an allowance of €19.10 per week (an allowance not raised since 2001), cannot afford to pay the bus fare. And anyway, the children have to take three buses at times to get to school and are often late. How about that commitment to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’ made at the Irish Declaration of Independence, when these children are prevented from accessing education?
Other women living in these holding camps spoke about being denied their clothing allowance because they looked too well dressed. Even though they buy all their clothes in charity shops, they are at the mercy of welfare officers who decide how well dressed they should be. Other women spoke about being denied access to education while awaiting a decision on their asylum application.
Whatever about the (now defunct) ‘Celtic Tiger’, at this economic downturn time, the people most seriously affected by the budget cuts are these women and their families, the real ‘hidden Ireland’.