A former Supreme Court judge has urged the Government to immediately end the direct provision system for housing asylum seekers in Ireland.
Catherine McGuinness spoke to the media outside the Department of Justice on Kildare Street, where she was accompanying three young asylum seekers handing their personal messages to a representative of the Minister for Justice as part of a ‘National Day of Action to End Institutionalised Living for Asylum Seekers’ held across the country on Tuesday 23 April.
“As a society we cannot allow this system to continue,” she said. “For years we have been learning about the abuses and harms inflicted on vulnerable people in Ireland’s past in unregulated, poorly monitored institutions where profit was valued over humanity.”
She added: “It is unspeakable that this is still happening today to a very vulnerable group of children, men and women.”
The day of action, co-ordinated by the Irish Refugee Council (IRC), included events in Cork, Galway, Tralee, Limerick and Castlebar where messages to Minister Alan Shatter were recorded and uploaded onto YouTube. Copies were also sent to the minister.
Protesters in Castlebar, meanwhile, lodged their protest directly with the constituency office of Taoiseach Enda Kenny.
In a statement, IRC chief executive Sue Conlan outlined in strongest terms why the system was doomed.
“The people in direct provision are forced to be dependent on the State, year in year out, with no control over their lives and no opportunity to work or make significant decisions for themselves, let alone their children,” she said.
“At the end of this, they are deskilled and demotivated and they then face an enormous challenge to integrate and become self-sufficient after so many years of dependency and social exclusion.”
She added: “It is difficult to understand why the authorities maintain this system when the evidence of the human, financial and social cost is clear.”
Conlan said the IRC believes that introducing a new reception system that is based on supporting asylum seekers during their early period in the country – and getting them into self-catering accommodation and legal access to employment after six months if their application for refugee status has not been processed – is the best way forward.
