Tag: asylum

Short plays about (racist) Ireland – 3

,
Ronit Lentin

On 20 June, International Refugee Day, Another mass deportation to Nigeria from Ireland took place.

According to Joe Moore of Anti Deportation Ireland (ADI: Hostels were raided at 5am approx this morning. The information I have to date is:

Carriick-on-Suir, one woman and her three children taken

Ashbourne House, Cork, one woman and her three children taken, she has been in Ireland for 6 years.

Portlaoise, two women, with three children each, all taken. One of the women has recently had a serious stomach operation. She became so distraught when the GNIB entered her room, that she attempted to harm herself with a knife. She was dragged outside, naked from the waist up, where she was severely beaten, peppered sprayed and handcuffed. As a result of the beating her operation scar opened. She was taken to hospital but after a short time she was brought back to the hostel, and she and her three children was taken to the airport by the GNIB. Her lawyer is in the High Court now trying to get her released.

The lawyer failed in reversing this deportation and the woman was on the plane!!

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”

Residency rights and deportations – good news for some?

Ronit Lentin

Having given the Minister for Justice a qualified welcome at the start of his term, the time has come to begin scrutinising the work of his Department on immigration and integration. Having abolished the office of the Minister for Integration and replaced it with an understaffed section called the office for the promotion of migrant integration, Minister Shatter has vowed to speed up citizenship applications – very good news, and introduce citizenship tests and citizenship ceremonies, less good news, but for some migrants a positive step all the same. And, last week his department granted residency to 850 non-EU parents of Irish citizen children, though only after the European Court of Justice ruled last March that the non-EU parents of EU citizens must be allowed to live and work in that EU state.  Continue reading “Residency rights and deportations – good news for some?”