On Friday 21 September, Emmanuel Marcel Landa – a 62-year-old asylum seeker from the DR Congo – was found dead in his room in the Mosney asylum centre.
Landa arrived in Ireland in 2005 and spent the last seven years of his life in direct provision. After his applications for asylum and leave to remain were refused he received a deportation order.
On 14 July 2011 he was put on a deportation flight to Congo that was forced to return to Ireland when the Algerian aviation authorities denied permission to travel through their airspace. During this failed deportation attempt, he suffered a heart attack. Back in Ireland he suffered two further heart attacks.
While the cause of his death is unclear, the negative effects of living in direct provision in terms of loneliness, bad diet, boredom, poverty, inactivity and substandard housing must have taken a heavy toll on his failing heart.
Commenting on his death, Sue Conlan, CEO of the Irish Refugee Council, said: “The impact of long delays, lengthy residence in direct provision accommodation and the real threat of deportation may well have been a contributory factor in Mr Landa’s untimely death.”
Landa’s life and death epitomise the scandal that is Ireland’s asylum politics, which returned to the news recently when Minister Alan Shatter confirmed in the Dáil that between 2000 and 2010 the State paid €655m to companies providing accommodation to asylum seekers. The management of Mosney, where Landa died, was paid €89m for accommodating 600 asylum seekers over 10 years.
Clearly, the economics of Ireland’s asylum politics don’t make any sense. While individual asylum seekers have since 2000 been receiving €19.10 per week (€9.60 per child), the centre operators received over €12,500 per resident for 2012. Beyond economics, the politics of asylum include the narrowing of the criteria whereby people are allowed to land to present their applications: numbers are decreasing, and in 2012 just 883 applications were received. Note too that Ireland, with just six per cent acceptances, has the lowest rates of acceptance in the EU, where the average is 27 per cent.
Last December there were 4,829 asylum seekers living in 35 centres; of these, the minister confirmed that 60 per cent were in direct provision for three years or more. He did not say that long-term residence in these hostels, some barely suitable for human habitation, causes institutionalisation, mental health and family problems, particularly when whole families (or sometimes several families) are forced to live in one room. Asylum seekers are at the mercy of hostel managers; those who complain are transferred to other hostels. They are not allowed to prepare their own food and, according to AkiDwA, women asylum seekers are often sexually harassed.
Asylum seekers also live with the constant threat of deportation, a major source of fear and trauma. Asylum hostels are sites of ‘deportability’, enabling the immigration authorities to round people up. Yet deportations, the minister argued in this paper, are “an unfortunate but necessary component of a balanced and fair immigration system…” This is a stance that fails to take on board the negative effects on people’s lives, people who could contribute to Irish society and economy.
Remembering Emmanuel Landa, I call on Metro Éireann readers to join Anti Deportation Ireland (ADI), led by asylum seekers, former asylum seekers and their supporters, in demanding the closure of the inhuman, unjust and economically unfair and costly direct provision system, and an end to all deportations.
Ronit Lentin is associate professor of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann
