Ireland ‘needs to learn lessons’ from France, Catherine McGuinness says

Ireland needs to "learn lessons" from the situation of isolated communities living in France, retired Supreme Court judge Catherine McGuinness has said.

The Government was making “constant pleas” to resolve the situation of illegal Irish working in the US while not being “particularly prepared” to adopt the same approach to certain immigrants in Ireland, she said.

Many of these immigrants had fled torture, violence and fear and yet we were "treating them as being completely unwelcome", Ms Justice McGuinness told a seminar in Galway yesterday.

The seminar on reform of the asylum system, which was addressed by three Galway-based residents in direct provision from Nigeria, South Africa and Iraq, was hosted by the Solas (Support, Orientation and Learning for Asylum Seekers) Galway/Mayo regional project.

Fuelling anger

Referring to the shootings in Paris that left 17 people dead last week, Ms Justice McGuinness said anger could be fuelled by a situation where large communities were living in "difficult conditions with so many unemployed" in suburbs outside the Paris périphérique, or ring road.

“Children being treated as second-class citizens” was a root cause of such anger, she said. “You let the problem grow and then you have an awful job trying to solve it.”

Ms Justice McGuinness, who is patron of the Irish Refugee Council (IRC), said 30 per cent of those living in direct provision were children, and their rights were incorporated in the children's referendum.

This could prove to be an opportunity for asserting rights, depending on the outcome of the Supreme Court appeal on the referendum due later this month, she said.

Amnesty

Referring to promised new legislation on the asylum system, she believed there should be an amnesty for people who have been living long term in direct provision. Some improvements in the current system included provision of a greater number of judges handling cases, and the issue of a greater number of judgments showing an “enlightened” appreciation of people’s circumstances.

The importance of legal advice was “crucial”, she said, along with speeding up cases, and improvements in the interpreter service. She recalled presiding over cases where interpretation was “not adequate”.

IRC chief executive Sue Conlan also referred to events in France, saying Ireland was "storing up problems for the future" if children in direct provision today "get the message that they are somehow second- class".

Ms Conlan said the United Nations had referred to the right to work as being an "essential element of human dignity". Yet Ireland was "out of step" with every European Union member state except Lithuania in barring asylum seekers from working, in the "belief that it would encourage more people to seek asylum here," she said.

Right to work

Iraqi astrophysicist Albaset Dhanoon, who has lived in direct provision for the past five years, latterly in Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo, appealed to Irish people to “let us be taxpayers” by affording the right to seek work.

He also called for more transparency, pointing out the cruelty of phrases such as “in the process”, “shortly” and “in due course”.

Chika Onyia from Nigeria, who has been in the system for more than seven years and lives in the Great Western Hostel in Galway, described how he had initially been imprisoned for more than four weeks, when he was arrested at Dublin Airport en route to Canada. He has engaged in voluntary work, including teaching elderly people how to use computers and phones with Age Action, as a form of "self-survival".

South African Nwabisa Zondani described the difficulties in trying to provide appropriate food for her two-year-old son while living in an institutional setting.