Category: Uncategorized

End direct provision system

Ronit Lentin

asylum-seekersI have written about the direct provision system several times. It is an inhumane system, in which hostel managers have the discretion to maltreat asylum seekers at will, and in which asylum seekers live in ‘zones of exception’ where the law pertaining to Irish citizens does not apply. Several reports have detailed the problems faced by asylum seekers in direct provision. However, although asylum seekers are never just victims of the system and although many have used inventive strategies to improve their condition despite not being allowed to work or study, only recently has a group of residents decided to spell the realities of their incarceration out.

Contrary to the Reception and Integration Agency (RIA)’s own House Rules and Procedures Booklet, this group, residing in Eyre Powell Hotel in Co Kildare, has outlined the realities of their existence. Let me look at some of RIA’s regulations and some of the realities. Continue reading “End direct provision system”

Headless hookers and suitcase bodies

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Ronit Lentin

In July 2004 a badly decomposed body, described by the media as that of ‘a black non-national woman’ was discovered in a black plastic bag on a river bank in Co Kilkenny. Because she arrived as an asylum seeker in 2000, and, like all asylum seekers, had been fingerprinted, Gardai identified her through the finger printing data base at the Garda National Immigration Bureau as that of the 25 year old married mother of two Paiche Onyemaechi. She turned out to be the daughter of the Malawian chief justice and a lap dancer and prostitute. Because her body was found without a head by a local Kilkenny woman walking her dog, it did not take long for media representations to describe Paiche Onyemaechi as a ‘headless hooker’. Continue reading “Headless hookers and suitcase bodies”

A, B and C: A parable for our (neo-liberal) times

Ronit Lentin

A was born shortly after the establishment of the state of Israel to a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family. He was an independent child who rebelled against authority – school and exam regimes were not for him. Like most Jewish (but also Palestinian-Bedouin and Palestinian-Druze) men, he joined the IDF, but once his military service was over, realizing he would not get a university place in Israel, his independence of spirit moved him to study engineering in a small US town. Since graduation he has worked on and off in a variety of managerial jobs in the armaments and construction industries. His American-born children were settled in the US so A and his wife, after one inconclusive attempt to return, and despite the longing for home, did what most migrants do and became settled in America, but socialized mostly with other Israelis.

Continue reading “A, B and C: A parable for our (neo-liberal) times”