‘Devout, profane and hard’, – chasing integration policy in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the experience of asylum seekers and refugees in Northern Ireland against the background of different periods of non-governance, arguing that consociationalism is hindering the implementation of an integration strategy. Northern Ireland is one of the only regions in the UK without a dedicated refugee integration strategy, in spite of one existing in draft form. As a devolved region, it sits outside the UK policy of asylum dispersal, but has to adhere to UK immigration legal policy. Northern Ireland has, however, the power to create and embed refugee integration policies and strategies as a devolved region. We seek to problematize the notion of refugee ‘integration’ within the context of a divided society, thereby questioning what it is asylum seekers and refugees are being asked to do within this discourse of integration. In a context where sectarianism continues to shape the spatial and social infrastructures, this is even more complex an aspiration.

KEYWORDS:

• refugees and asylum seekers
• ‘Sectarian omnipresence’
• consociationalism
• integration policy
• Northern Ireland

Introduction

Northern Ireland, a region often characterized as ‘a place apart’ (Wilson, 2020) and a ‘troubled beauty’ (Tuama, 2013) in equal measure, has witnessed different waves of immigration in its history. Since the early 2000s, this has continued apace and the region has experienced diversification in positive and enriching ways, particularly in its urban areas. However, Northern Ireland’s status as a devolved polity within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland means it does not have legislative powers over immigration or asylum laws but does so on matters of so called ‘integration’. It does not, however, have a dedicated refugee integration strategy. Northern Ireland is thus in a very complex position with respect to asylum and refuge and subject to the whims of Westminster, with its very particular socio-political context often being rendered invisible. Issues of hate crime and racially motivated violence have also increased with alacrity since the 2000s (Shirlow et al., 2013), at one point earning Northern Ireland the title of ‘race-hate capital of Europe’. The Northern Ireland landscape is, thus, one troubled by legacies of violent conflict (O’Dowd & McKnight, 2013; Shirlow, 2006), sectarianism, poverty, austerity and, more recently, the pandemic and cost of living crisis.

With the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, Northern Ireland became ‘a devolved constituent region of the UK’ (McCall, 2013). Nonetheless, Northern Ireland continues to be embroiled in a ‘groundhog-day’ political scenario; with six suspensions of Stormont, which is the Northern Ireland seat of government, between the beginning of December 1999 and May 2023.¹, ² Two of these were for longer periods, mid-October 2002–7 March 2007, and again between January 2017 and January 2020. Another suspension started in May 2022, after an election which saw Sinn Féin as the winning party ahead of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), and potentially, Michelle O’Neill their leader, becoming the First Minister.

It might be argued that these various suspensions of governmental power are a problematic effect of enshrined consociationalism in that it seems to play a role in perpetuating a cycle of political governance crises compounded by larger issues such as BREXIT (Anderson, 2018; Fitzpatrick & O’Sullivan, 2021; Wood & Gilmartin, 2018). Thus, despite the concerted efforts of activists, advocates, academics and policymakers (Michaels & Devine, 2018), coloniality, sectarianism and division continue to shape Northern Ireland. These ongoing disruptions have been to the detriment for asylum seeker and refugee issues in Northern Ireland, as we will highlight herein.

In this article, we thus consider how political instability since the Good Friday Agreement has contributed to the neglect and dehumanization of asylum seekers and refugees in complex and interlinked ways. We focus on the time period 2016–2023, more specifically, during which we have been engaged as scholars, researchers and advocates on issues of asylum and refuge in Northern Ireland. Political instability in Northern Ireland has largely been composed of cycles of governance and non-governance-and as such- the inability to spend allocated budgets on dedicated matters, as well as the lack of decision making around strategies and their implementation. As such, our engagement here, is both timely and significant given the ongoing debates about the merits of a refugee integration strategy for Northern Ireland and the broader hostile environment context within the UK and how this might impact Northern Ireland’s approach to asylum and refuge (Atwell 2022).

Asylum policy is not devolved within the UK, but integration policy with respect to health, education or housing, for example, is. This places Northern Ireland in a complex situation with its unique history and context within the United Kingdom. It is in this regard we see the existence and implementation of a refugee integration strategy as being at the minimum a necessary framework to open up the possibility of better services and a new politics of inclusion for asylum seekers and refugees in Northern Ireland.

Here, we are interested in how concepts of ‘integration’ and an ‘integration strategy’ in the context of newcomers, e.g. asylum seekers and refugees, in Northern Ireland could work against ongoing community division and sectarianism. Further, we also seek to contribute to international debates on how through integration policies, host societies might be better able to offer its newcomers, particularly asylum seekers and refugees, crucial forms of social inclusion (Ghorashi, 2021; Rast & Ghorashi, 2018). While we do not perform a broad analysis of public policy in Northern Ireland herein, it is important to flag that our work, as both scholarly researchers and advocates takes an active interest in the policy landscape and in how asylum and refuge issues intersect. To state the obvious, public policy assumes many different forms and objectives (Shore et al., 2011; Shore & Wright, 2003) and has a complex social life of its own in any given context. Shore (2006) tells us that, ‘by definition “policy” implies a course of action that is expedient, rational and goal-oriented; an objectified programme for penetrating and acting upon the social’ (Shore, 2006, p. 10). In Northern Ireland, this is a complexified ‘post-conflict’ social wherein public policy faces many challenges, particularly in spaces where Westminster still looms large. Asylum and refuge are one such space.

We begin our argument with a potted history of immigration to Northern Ireland, foregrounding the paradox of how ‘newcomers’ such as migrants or displaced persons as visible minorities experienced marginalization whilst living in a conflict-ridden Northern Ireland. Secondly, we discuss the notion of integration and how this relates to a de facto sectarian society politically framed and democratically locked into the system of consociationalism. Here, we contextualize some of the contested terms we are using, such as sectarianism and give a sense of integration as a concept and a policy orientation which has a broad literature (Bartram & Jarochova, 2022; Favell, 2022; Green et al., 2020a), one which invites widespread scrutiny and disagreement. Given the wide variation in this literature, we aim just to signpost some of the key works. Third, we reflect on the lack of implementation of a tendered study for the Stormont Racial Equality Unit on the everyday experience of asylum seekers and refugees. This study shaped a draft refugee integration strategy, which has thus far not yet been implemented. Herein, we discuss the main findings of that funded consultancy to the backdrop of policy notions of ‘integration’ and what this conveys in the context of a conflict/ post-conflict society. We posit the feminist concept of intersectionality as key in pinpointing some of the complexities and paradoxes when speaking of minority and majority identities encompassing a shared vision of a more democratic and socially just society. We conclude by discussing how meaningful change is possible in the space of a more open society of becoming in Northern Ireland.

A short history of visible minorities in Northern Ireland: immigration, sectarianism and conflict society in the twentieth and twenty-first century

Northern Ireland has a troubled history that continues to inflect the present. Through the early modern invasion by English Protestants, political dynamics from the ethno-religious conflicts continue into the twenty-first century, enmeshed with social class. Catholics and the Catholic community, at large, became targeted and discriminated institutionally. Whilst violent conflict in Northern Ireland started at the end of the 1960s (the so called ‘Troubles’) and lasted until 1998, the presence of Great Britain’s military forces and the role this played in triggering political violence is still a very much contested issue. (Lawther, 2015; Upton, 2009). As such, the historical ethno-religious conflict continues to some degree to frame the identities of those born in Northern Ireland.³ This legacy of conflict poses situated and particular challenges for any ‘newcomers’ to Northern Ireland, particularly within the narrative of ‘integration’.

The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 marked a symbolic turning point in the context of mobility and migration in Northern Ireland. This enabled of a process of ‘normalisation’ across community life and a somewhat less violent every day. As such, this signalled to people outside the regional–local communities that this part of the UK might be an attractive place to move to for education (McDermott, 2008) or work (Bell et al., 2004) or seeking international protection. (Malischewski, 2013; Murphy & Vieten, 2017). Less widely acknowledged, however, is the history of migration pre-dating the Good Friday Agreement, as well as the history of internal displacement on the island engendered through the conflict (see the work of Niall Gilmartin in this special issue). According to Crangle (2018), a population census between 1937 and 1991 illustrates the growth of the Chinese and the Indian community (2018, p. 28). Crangle discusses the invisibility of these two communities in Northern Ireland while problematizing the delayed introduction of the Race Relations (Northern Ireland) Order. A common assumption posited that there was no race discrimination in Northern Ireland as they supposedly they were no non-white people or visible minorities. Indeed, in 1958, one civil servant wrote that ‘there never has been any discrimination on account of colour or race’, and Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, Terrence O’Neill, agreed, stating in a 1964 cabinet meeting that there was ‘no colour problem’. (Crangle, 2018, p. 26). Crangle offers his own interpretation of the delay in anti-racist legislation in Northern Ireland by suggesting that the deferral partly might have been caused by fears within the Protestant community that Catholics might potentially use the Race Relations Act 1965 to tackle ‘religiously motivated’ institutional discrimination (2018, p. 3) Crangle briefly posits that it was the Conservative Government in February 1997 that passed the Race Relations Order, indeed, when Stormont was still not functioning. With the introduction of the Race Relations Order in 1997, only a year before the Good Friday Agreement, the tide seemed to turn. Jarman (2013) states that there was a rise of new immigration post-1998 with a significant number of Portuguese workers immigrating to NI in 2001, and post-2004, EU citizens/migrants coming from Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia and the Czech Republic. Though statistical information illustrates that immigration patterns strongly related to the local labour market opportunities, and were distinctive in Northern Ireland with more people moving to rural areas and smaller towns, no integration policy developed as a result. There are also key lessons in this history in terms of the different waves of immigration and, indeed, resettlement processes in Northern Ireland. As Crangle (2018) points out, the history of resettlement in Northern Ireland begins with the Vietnamese and the failures around this have carried over into other resettlement programmes with Syrian and Afghan refugees from 2015 onwards.

BREXIT, the UK’s decision in 2016 to leave the European Union further triggered new legal and socio-economic complexities (McDowell et al., 2015; Schiek, 2018⁴) particularly acute in Northern Ireland bordering the Republic of Ireland. BREXIT has also compounded and contributed to growing hostility in Northern Ireland (Doyle & Connolly, 2019). Coupled with tensions during the pandemic around approaches to COVID-19 mitigation (Nolan et al., 2021) this resulted in an increase in sectarian tensions, too. East European (e. g. Poles and Lithuanians) migrants, who were, ‘among the largest minority populations in Northern Ireland’ (Jarman, 2013, p. 58) pre-2016 can still be counted as the largest European migrant community in NI (Kempny, 2019).

To summarize, one aspect of the ‘normalisation’ process in Northern Ireland, meant that different groups of international migrants, such as European (EU) citizens for example, and since the 2000s asylum seekers have come to Northern Ireland. With the ‘Vulnerable Person Relocation’⁵ scheme about 558⁶ of Syrian refugees arrived in 2016 to make a new life in Belfast and Derry. At present, in 2023, one thousand and eight hundred Syrians have made Northern Ireland their new home, and similar schemes are planned to being created for Afghan and Ukrainian refugees.⁷ Though this development means that twenty-first century Northern Ireland is a more multi-cultural and diverse place, there are still specific institutional discriminatory structures complicating the wellbeing and settlement of newcomer-migrants. This is the major challenge for how the notion of integration is constructed in a Northern Ireland context and for how an integration strategy might do the genuine, impactful work of enhancing social inclusion processes.

Integration: a challenging concept

The question of how genuinely impactful refugee integration strategies can be on the lives of asylum seekers and refugees is one that is often put forward (Fanning & Michael, 2018). While it is outside of the remit of this paper to delve into how integration policies work with real effect in people’s individual lives, it is critical to state that inclusive policies produce a range of positive outcomes for asylum seekers and refugees and this impact often extends beyond into the mainstream, also positively impacting the host society (Bilgili, 2015; Bilgili et al., 2015; González Garibay & De Cuyper, 2013; Green et al., 2020b; Neureiter, 2019; Termote, 2011).

Integration as a concept is problematic and has been readily critiqued as placing unrealistic expectations on asylum seekers and refugees. Rytter, for example, tells us that integration is ‘an open signifier with fuzzy qualities’. Definitions of integration range from a list of specific, policy style ‘target’ indicators, see as an example the EU Zaragoza indicators (2010; cited in Gilmartin & Dagg, 2021a; Penninx & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2016) to broad celebratory statements anchored in notions of belonging and hope (Gilmartin & Dagg, 2021a). According to Ndofor-Tah et al. (2019) the UK Home Office states that an integrated community can be imagined as one, ‘where people, whatever their background, live, work, learn and socialise together, based on shared rights, responsibilities and opportunities’ (2019, p. 11). The OECD (2018) posits that integration is, ‘the ability of immigrants to achieve the same social and economic outcomes as natives taking into account their characteristics’ (OECD/EU, 2018, p. 17). This definition is anchored in specific ‘measurable’, spaces such as labour market access, education, civic and social engagement and living conditions (OECD/EU, 2018).

It is also important to flag that there has been a large range of research conducted into the ways that integration strategies and policies bring positive benefits both tangible and intangible, with some outcomes being more visible than others. The work of the MIPEX, the migration policy group (Bartram & Jarochova, 2022; Green et al., 2020a; Ruedin, 2015) who have a range of different projects examining how integration indicators and strategies work in different contexts across the globe evinces this in a balanced manner. Core to the outcomes of this large-scale study is a sense of how integration indicators can improve policies and outcomes for beneficiaries as well as a clear sense of which countries are producing successful strategies and policies. The Migrant integration policy index https://www.mipex.eu/ focuses on eight key areas of life – labour, market, mobility, child education, antidiscrimination, health, political participation, residency and citizenship. With all strategies and policies, there are wide-ranging implementation gaps (Dixon et al., 2017), between context and public opinion, and the legal framework. Certain elements of a particular context, for example, the labour market, might be much more determinant than the strategy or policy itself in terms of an individual’s journey of inclusion in each society. Efficacy and discursive gaps in terms of the success of integration strategies and policies are thus often not as large as we might expect (Dixon et al., 2017).

Ager and Strang’s (2008) work with their emphasis on integration being a two-way process inclusive of the need of the host society to work towards inclusion was central to much of our applied and scholarly work on the case study in Northern Ireland. This is an integration process beginning from day one of the asylum journey (Murphy & Vieten, 2017). Critical scholars (Bloch & Doná, 2019; Doná, 2007; 2015) on state policy targeting asylum seekers and young refugees suggest that home-making and inclusive spaces are what is needed to support vulnerable minorities trying to settle in the UK. Challenging the presumed homogeneity of societies, more generally, and questioning ‘homogeneity in integration theory’ (Malischewski, 2016, p. 22) is key. Indeed, the homogeneity of national societies in many contexts is the result of histories of ethnic cleansing, and a narration of a distinctive national ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983, 2016) that needs to be more keenly addressed and unpicked in integration and anti-racist strategies.

There is thus a common need to work on integration and inclusion, particularly given our collective failings to provide adequately for those seeking refuge; this is somewhat acute in Northern Ireland. As Gilmartin and Dagg (2021a, p. 3) remind us, there are several issues with the concept of integration, ‘The first is definitional: what exactly does integration mean? The second is empirical: what does integration look like? The third is political: what work does the concept of integration do?’ Such questions permeate our work in a continuous way and similarly inflect this article as we consider integration in a Northern Ireland context.

Northern Ireland a place apart for asylum seekers and refugees?

While the overall figures of asylum seekers in Northern Ireland represent less than 1% of the overall UK numbers, the accommodation of asylum seekers and refugees, and their ‘integration’ nonetheless pose challenges for state policy, social institutions and employers in Northern Ireland. This has become even more urgent with the mass displacement of people fleeing war in Syria and seeking refuge through Europe in 2015 and 2016, and with the current scale of refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine since February 2022.

A systemic lack in acknowledging the diversification of the Northern Ireland’s social fabric also frames the institutional failure to implement a refugee integration strategy. The Migrant and Ethnic Minority Council (MME Council)⁸ alongside several other refugee support organizations do important lobbying work regarding ethnic minority issues, however, within a context of political stalemate it has been very difficult to advance a wide range of social inclusion issues. Hence, the political context and dynamics in Northern Ireland are inimical to the project of social inclusion at a number of different levels. In Northern Ireland – as with other societies recovering from violent conflict, such as Lebanon, Macedonia and Bosnia–Herzegovina – consociational power-sharing has been established to help to develop post-conflict governmental structures. With the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, this model of governance was enshrined legally, thereby demanding the coalition of political parties that represent the divided ethno-religious (or ethno-national) groups (Kennedy et al., 2016). Kennedy et al. (2016) argue that consociationalism fails fundamentally to understand that gender, and particularly the position of women, traverses the binary of conflictive ethno-religious communities. Indeed, when one reflects on women’s positionalities as cross-cutting group boundaries, it becomes clear that the unwillingness to engage with such social complexities means that female asylum seekers and refugees’ lives are often misunderstood and misrepresented in policy and practice. So too understanding the ways that asylum, in all its heterogeneity, is gendered, raced and classed.

Understanding the relationship between sectarianism and racism is crucial to laying out the terms of what good integration and social inclusion policy and practice might look like. Racism and its relationship with sectarianism in Northern Ireland has been well analysed (Brewer, 1992; McVeigh & Rolston, 2007; McKee 2016; Gilligan, 2017), also with a focus on contact hypothesis and cultural marginality, and multiculturalism. We follow Brewer, who in 1992, argued that sectarianism can be considered as, ‘the determination of actions, attitudes and practices about religious difference, which results in them invoked as the boundary marker to represent social stratification and conflict’ (Brewer, 1992, p. 359). Most importantly, it is about ‘ideas, actions and social structure’ (Brewer, 1992). Can sectarian violence be symmetric, and should anti-Protestant hate speech or actions be regarded as sectarian too? As far as the individual level is concerned, we might agree that this can be the experience of everyday encounters and criminal law should be tailored to respond to it. However, there remains the structural distinction along the lines of historical institutional discrimination (as legacy) targeting Catholic communities (‘social structure’). Further, we would argue that in order to grasp the tensions between racism and sectarianism, it is helpful to follow Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1992) conceptualization of ‘racialised boundaries’. What we need is a heuristic tool to understand the social complexity of individual racist actions and institutionalized racism.

We agree here with Gilligan (2019, p. 115) that the main issue in Northern Ireland is ‘racialisation, not colour-coded racism’. That said it does not mean that black people are racially attacked, but it suggests that racism and sectarianism might sometimes coincide and white East Europeans in this reading are included as situated racialized minority, for example. When looking at discussions beyond Northern Ireland, e.g. Britain, the link between sectarianism and racism is not taken seriously enough in hegemonic discourses on racisms and colonial legacies of othering in Europe (Vieten, 2011). The statement by the UN Advisory Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (2011) and Council of Europe (2011) on racism and sectarianism is worth considering in this regard ‘(treating) sectarianism as a distinct issue rather than as a form of racism (is) problematic, as it allows sectarianism to fall outside the scope of accepted anti-discrimination and human rights protection standards’. Applied to the Northern Ireland context, Doebler et al. (2018, p. 2440) found a correlation between sectarianism and ‘negativity towards ethnic minorities and immigrants’.

Following these considerations, we argue that the continuing presence of sectarianism, what has been called ‘sectarian omnipresence’ (Vieten & Murphy, 2019) impacts the life of all communities, and frames the way minorities are expected to adjust and integrate to Northern Ireland. We foreground here the wider impact of ‘sectarian omnipresence’, which captures the projection of a sectarian threat even when the actual experience of a sectarian offence might not occur (Vieten & Murphy, 2019). Sectarian omnipresence refers to a climate of distrust and frames the contact and communication for newly arrived people, such as asylum seekers and refugees, as well as the general lens towards any individual and community in many parts of Northern Ireland. Consequently, the wider societal implications of sectarianism and racism have to be tackled to go beyond the level of individual ‘hate crimes’. The societal effects of sectarian divisions are many, but here it concerns how it manifests as a climate of anxiety among asylum seekers and refugees as much as within the host communities.

Further, in the Northern Ireland context, the fact of a shared island, where two very different kinds of asylum policies obtain but cross-border relationships are an imperative, needs to be better considered across the island (Murphy and Vieten, 2017). The all-island response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a weak one, attenuated by division and politics, and ultimately one which failed border dwellers and border crossers on the island and within this, people seeking refuge (Gusciute, 2020; Heenan, 2020; Matthews, 2021; 2021; Nolan et al., 2021). The pandemic showed how critical all-island approaches to a range of issues are. As such, how we understand the island of Ireland with respect to overall notions of social inclusion and cohesion has a much overlooked role. Indeed, all of these entanglements and layers within everyday life in Northern Ireland and the island of Ireland need to be better harnessed in our conversations on what integration should like in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Asylum seekers and refugees’ experiences of everyday life in Northern Ireland

In December 2017, the report ‘Asylum Seekers and Refugees’ experiences of everyday life in Northern Ireland’ was launched at Queen’s University Belfast, at a time when there was no regional parliament sitting. This report was developed out of consultancy research for the Racial Equality Unit in Stormont with the intention that it would inform the development of a robust refugee integration strategy for the region. The report was well received, particularly by those working with asylum seekers and refugees. Ultimately, however, the absence of the devolved government meant that a refugee integration strategy, which at that time in 2017 existed in draft form, for asylum seekers and refugees in Northern Ireland was never implemented. This was a greatly missed opportunity to do things differently in Northern Ireland, in essence to present a co-designed version of an integration strategy, which would have opened the pathway to a more inclusive vision of what a participatory and equal society should look like for all.

In January 2020, when the devolved government at Stormont agreed to sit parliament, those with a vested interest in the 2017 report had high hopes that things might change for the better with respect to the implementation of a refugee integration strategy when the Northern Ireland government resumed power. In February 2022, the Executive Office held a consultation⁹ on a strikingly different version of the recommendations for the original refugee integration strategy. A period of consultation ensued with a range of different voices from varied sectors positing their belief that this version of the strategy was not the one that was initially suggested by the researchers and developed by the Racial Equality Unit in Stormont. The report had made a range of important recommendations, and, to date, in 2023, these have not been adequately addressed. In particular, poor housing, high destitution levels and inadequate legal advice are major areas needing to be addressed. These issues have degraded dramatically with the Covid19 pandemic and ensuing cost of living crisis. It continues to be third sector organizations and volunteer organizations that attempt to do the work that the State should be doing with respect to social inclusion issues; this brings many challenges, not least because of a dearth of funding and resources.

The Asylum Seekers and Refugees’ experiences of everyday life in Northern Ireland (2017) report foregrounded voices and stories through a definition of integration anchored in the belief that as a mode of being and practice, integration should be a two-way process wedded to notions of collaboration, reciprocity and sharing. Whilst cognisant that, in a Northern Ireland context especially, the notion of shared space and place is complex (Bryan, 2000; Bryan, 2014; Bryan & Gillespie, 2005; Bryan & Stevenson, 2009; Dixon et al., 2020; Huck et al., 2019; Komarova & Svašek, 2018; McDowell et al., 2015), the possibility of remaking place and space through a reciprocal and dialogic framing of what integration should look like was a key approach in this report. So instead of asking what asylum seekers and refugees should integrate into, the study foregrounded voice, story and experience, and posited that there was the possibility of reimagining Northern Ireland society in a way that would and should benefit all of its members through a narrative of social inclusion and cohesion. Spaces of health, labour (employment), education, legal provision and housing were examined in order to map how asylum seekers and refugees were accessing and using these spaces.

Statistics on the numbers of asylum seekers and refugees for Northern Ireland was not available to the researchers of the 2017 report. One of the challenges of ascertaining exact figures on asylum and refuge in Northern Ireland is that the Home Office merges statistical data on Scotland and Northern Ireland. In 2015, there were approximately 600 asylum seekers living in Northern Ireland, mostly residing in Belfast, with an average of 200–300 new applications per year. (Murphy & Vieten, 2017). In 2018, EMBRACE, a Christian voluntary group based in Northern Ireland and supporting asylum seekers and refugees, counted 840 people in supported asylum accommodation¹⁰ These numbers have increased substantially since 2020, due to both ongoing resettlement programmes and individual international protection applicants arriving from particular conflict-ridden regions. This increase in figures is reflected in the use of so called, contingency accommodation (i. e. hotels) (Jennings, 2022).

The methodological approach in our study was one embracing of the notion of ‘intersectionality’. The success of the concept acknowledges the ground-breaking argument and research conducted by US black feminists, most prominently Patricia Hill Collins (1990) and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1991). Crenshaw introduced the term ‘intersectionality’ stressing that single-axis discrimination (i. e. gender) left black women outside the focus group ‘woman’. Hence, the focus on intersecting categories must be situated and connected to the historical embedding of group struggles and should be interpreted with respect to Northern Ireland with prominent intersecting angles such as class, gender/ sex and religion (e. g. Rooney, 2006). Applied to research cohorts of asylum seekers and refugees it means considering diverse individual needs and trans-locational positionings (Anthias, 2008; 2015) shaped by intersecting dimensions of social categories such as class, (male) sex/ gender, (homo-) sexuality and age, for example (Murphy & Vieten, 2020; Vieten & Murphy, 2019).

The report mapped out several issues of concern relating to health (mental) and safe housing. For example, the advocacy agency PPR has argued that the continued placement of asylum seekers into housing in areas where there is a clear shortage is, ‘de-facto enabling a housing policy in the City of Belfast which embeds “no-go areas” for refugees and concentrates them in specific areas with multiple deprivations … [that] manifests in severe housing shortage, housing stress and homelessness’ (Right to a Home 2022).

One of the participants pointed out:

I go to housing, no house, me I am very crying. Yeah a lot of crying for long months, very depression and in my country, for Darfur, I don’t know how this is not house okay, I’m very crying. I take my country, I’m coming here, here is not house, I’m crying, I’m two daughter, where are we going and they sleep in the street, sleeping in the Mosque for my prayer at the Mosque and the city church. But is not house, not good after that, NICRAS help me okay, I’m housed. (Sudanese asylum seeker, female).

Indeed, many of the examples in the report underscore, too, the ways in which inequality in Northern Ireland persists and continues to shape different sectors, in spite of strong equality legislation. The structural discriminations built into many aspects of everyday life in Northern Ireland often present an intractable hurdle for asylum seekers and refugees who find themselves doubly discriminated against in their navigation of these systems and services. ‘Sectarian omnipresence’ (Vieten & Murphy, 2019) also presents daily challenges to persons seeking asylum and refuge and these need to be considered within any integration strategy:

It does affect me because, especially because now for me, I have a child with an Irish woman … because she wouldn’t go to Protestant areas, which limits my movement with my daughter, to wherever I want to go and definitely, it affects me too much, because I used to and I stay in … a lot. Like if I go looking for a house now, she’s not happy because of where I’m going to take, do you know what I mean? (Kenyan Refugee, M.)

The common thread that runs through many of the report’s findings is thus the need to think through these different sectors and spaces in a unified, collective manner; one inclusive of the needs of all members of Northern Ireland society, a process underpinned by ideals of decoloniality, inclusion and design justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020; Whitbeck, 1996). This is ultimately core to the approach of many working supportively in the refugee space in Northern Ireland:

I suppose that a refugee integration strategy should be determined by people who have experienced the system as asylum seekers and refugees and then the service providers. But it has to be an encompassing strategy. (…)it has to take on board education needs, health needs, social care needs and pathways to employment, language. (Health service professional)

The issue of representation is thus critically important in terms of whose voices and lived experiences are being prioritized in the production of integration strategies, entangled with this is both the issue of privileging so-called expert discourses as well as the racialized hierarchies which often emerge from within migration, integration and resettlement policies. A Housing Sector professional describes it as, ‘A recognition that their difference should not in any way result in a less quality service than others, that difference could be that they are a refugee or that they’re disabled or that they’re gay or something like that’.

Our report made clear that many working in this area in Northern Ireland are very definite on this and have a strong vision of what needs to be done with respect to social inclusion. How diverse frames of knowing can be accommodated within integration strategies and policies is a core concern of many working on asylum and refuge issues in Northern Ireland. This is vital in order to move beyond the ways in which integration management has hitherto functioned as an exclusionary politics of knowing and difference. It is also crucial if we are to ensure a fully anti-racist underpinning to such strategies. This calls for a discourse of integration and social inclusion which allows a reimagining of place, practice and policy through the lens of diverse ways of knowing and being. Key here is also a strategy that situates reciprocity, co-production and co-imagining as core to better social inclusion and cohesion. However, given how unstable Northern Ireland’s governance patterns have been since the Good Friday Agreement, this is a roadmap towards inclusion and integration that first calls for a dismantling and a restructuring then a collective reimagining which centres all voices, including asylum seeker and refugee voices and stories. Without this commitment, social cohesion in Northern Ireland will remain fragile.

Concluding remarks: is there hope for a reimagined integration in Northern Ireland?

Recent literature on the shifts in asylum policy have highlighted the slow violence (Mayblin et al., 2020) of migration policy, particularly in its recharacterization and, indeed, criminalization of the right to seek asylum (Mayblin, 2019), and the latest ‘Illegal migration bill’, voted on in the British parliament is testament to this shift. The intersections of colonial violence alongside the continuity of community divisions create the political-cultural background where Northern Ireland both because of, and in spite of, its complex colonial and violent history has now an opportunity to work towards a different kind of approach to integration and inclusion. Yet, it has allowed political instability to curb any attempts to move forward with a whole range of urgent social policies in different yet all equally important areas for Northern Ireland everyday life.

Whilst aware of the performative overtures of policy, we, nonetheless, believe that a participatory integration strategy for refugees and other newcomers would build a much-needed infrastructure to better the lives of asylum seekers and refugees in Northern Ireland. At the time of writing in Northern Ireland many asylum seekers find themselves stranded, living in hotels and hostels. Despite 25 years of relative peace, also encompassing a diversification with respect to the social fabric, Northern Ireland’s policy approach lacks the will and strategy to develop a more cohesive vision of inclusion for majority and minority communities. The 2017 report’s recommendations on the everyday experiences of asylum seekers and refugees in Northern Ireland and the draft integration strategy were never implemented. Due to a series of power suspensions of regional devolved government, the interests and wellbeing of asylum seekers and refugees were, and are, put at risk as they seem to be regarded as secondary to hegemonic and consocational political party representation of the two main ethno-religious Christian communities. We see a non-functioning local government as being at the centre of what causes delay and blockage to policy advancements and implementation. This applies to the refusal to implement an integration strategy for migrants e. g refugees, but equally to other urgent matters of public community interest, such as funding of health, education, and, after the 2022/2023 winter energy crisis, decisions on budget and wealth distribution.

While many integration strategies emphasize an integration that is a two-way process, we posit also moving beyond this, where possible, into the lived experience of integration, thus foregrounding the complexity of everyday life and inclusion, particularly in post-conflict and divided societies. Inspirational discussions are now taking place on how the fissures in cross-border relationships, strategies and policies which were laid bare during the pandemic can be remedied through new laboratories and imaginaries, in particular around social welfare (M. P. Murphy, 2021). Asylum seeker and refugee experiences should provide the fundamental framework for how we co-design and co-produce nascent approaches to integration and social inclusion. Core here too is a centring of more inclusive family re-unification, the right to work and better education and labour market integration, as well as clear pathways to permanent citizenship and voting rights. Such a commitment is also a commitment to uproot and disrupt how colonial inequities persist and to importantly, shape critical, reflective, anti-colonial and anti-racist integration discourses in Northern Ireland and on the small, shared island of Ireland.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two guest editors for their support and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and advice how to strengthen our argument and the direction of our paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ulrike M. Vieten

Ulrike M. Vieten is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Sociology (of Gender, Migration and Racisms) in SSESW, Queen’s University Belfast.

Fiona Murphy

Fiona Murphy is an Assistant Professor in Refugee and Intercultural Studies in SALIS, Dublin City University.

Notes

1 Devout, profane and hard is a line in the Northern Ireland poet Louis MacNeice called Valedictions-the poem is about Belfast but also the island of Ireland as a whole.

2 This is the date/ month the article was accepted.

3 It also does with respect to Irish diasporas, but there is no space here to reflect on this.

4 https://nilq.qub.ac.uk/index.php/nilq/article/view/174

5 The United Kingdom has established a resettlement programme for Syrian refugees – the Vulnerable Persons Relocation (VPR) scheme. Northern Ireland has been a recipient of both programme refugees (through the VPR scheme) as well as having an estimated number of 200–300 new asylum seekers per year from different locations. Northern Ireland has also received individuals with refugee status from Somalia.

6 https://www.embraceni.org/information/asylum/syrian-refugees-in-northern-ireland/

7 https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/9166/documents/159683/default/

8 https://www.mmecouncil.org/

9 https://consultations.nidirect.gov.uk/teo/refugee-integration-strategy-for-northern-ireland/

10 https://www.embraceni.org/asylum/uk-asylum-statistics.