Asylum seekers, Ireland, and the return of the repressed

Abstract

In 2014 residents in Direct Provision Centres for asylum seekers staged a series of protests. The protests, which coincided with the appointment of a new Minister for Justice who announced the Irish government’s plans to reform the asylum system, voiced three clear demands. Firstly, the protestors demanded that all asylum centres be closed; secondly, they demanded that all residents be given the right to remain and work in Ireland; and thirdly, they demanded an end to all deportations. The government’s response to these protests was to appoint a working group in October 2014, made up of representatives of migrant-support NGOs (but without any significant representation of asylum seekers themselves) while also announcing that it intends to reform rather than abolish the system.

Against this background, this paper makes three interlinked theoretical propositions. Firstly, I propose that just as the Irish state and society managed to ignore workhouses, mental health asylums, “mother and baby homes”, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, they also “manage not to know” of the plight of asylum seekers, precisely because the Direct Provision system isolates asylum applicants, makes them dependent on bed and board and a small “residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites”, and makes it difficult for them to organise on a national level. “Managing not to know”, or disavowing, entails the erasure of the Direct Provision system from Ireland’s collective consciousness at a time when increasing emigration is returning to haunt Irish society after years of refusing to confront the pain of emigration. I argue that asylum seekers represent the return of Ireland’s repressed that confronts Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence. Secondly, I propose that by taking action and representing themselves, the residents of Direct Provision Centres can no longer be theorised as Agamben’s “bare life”, at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done and who are therefore not considered active agents in their own right. The third proposition responds to the theme of this special issue, that multiculturalism is “in crisis”, arguing in the conclusion that this “crisis” hardly applies to Ireland, where the brief flirtations with “interculturalism” by state, society but also Irish studies disavow race and racism in favour of a returning obsession with emigration, which enables the continued disavowal of the experiences of asylum seekers in Direct Provision.

Keywords:

• Direct Provision Centres
• asylum seekers
• migrant activism
• crisis of multiculturalism

Acknowledgment

Thanks to David Landy for his helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Loyal, Understanding Immigration, 102.

2. Goffman, Asylums. Cited in Loyal, Understanding Immigration, 106–7.

3. Loyal, Understanding Immigration, 106–7.

4. NASC, "Hidden Cork," 27–8.

5. FLAC, Direct Discrimination?; FLAC, One Size Doesn’t Fit All; AkiDwA, Am Only Saying It Now; Moreo and Lentin, From Catastrophe to Marginalisation; Irish Refugee Council, Difficult to Believe.

6. Luibhéid, Pregnant on Arrival, 91.

7. Lentin and Moreo, “Migrant Deportability.”

8. Deegan, “Direct Provision Contractors.”

9. Agamben, Homo Sacer; Agamben, State of Exception.

10. These demands were articulated by Anti Deportation Ireland, a national, multi-ethnic grassroots network/alliance of activists, asylum seekers, refugees, community workers, trade unionists, and academics who have come together to campaign against forced deportation in Ireland, and for the abolition of the Direct Provision system.

11. http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/PR15000389 (accessed February 20, 2015).

12. The Journal, “The Way We Treat Asylum Seekers.”

13. As articulated by Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI), https://www.facebook.com/pages/MASI-Movement-of-Asylum-Seekers-in-Ireland/321969801334321?sk=photos (accessed February 20, 2015).

14. NASC, “Minister’s Announcement.”

15. Lentin, “There is No Movement.”

16. Lentin, “Anti-racist Responses.”

17. Lentin and Titley, Crises of Multiculturalism.

18. Cohen, States of Denial, 5–6.

19. O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, Patients, Prisoners and Penitents.

20. Fitzsimons, “Opinion.”

21. O’Toole, “Repression.”

22. Ibid.

23. Freud, The Uncanny.

24. Lentin and Goldstone, No More Blooms.

25. Ward, “Ireland and Refugees.”

26. Lentin and McVeigh, After Optimism?, 45.

27. RIA, Statistics.

28. Ibid.

29. Irish Refugee Council, Difficult to Believe.

30. Fitzsimons, “Opinion.”

31. Agamben, State of Exception, 23.

32. Wacquant, “‘Suitable enemies,’” 218.

33. Walters, “Deportation,” 286.

34. Agamben, Homo Sacer.

35. Hall, “Spectacle of the ‘Other.’”

36. Lentin and McVeigh, Racism and Anti-racism

37. Lentin, “Anti-racist Responses,” 236.

38. Hesse, “Introduction,” 19.

39. The Journal, “I Don’t Know How to Be Happy.”

40. Ibid.

41. KRAC, “Concerns by Kinsale Road.”

42. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 123.

43. Ibid, 131.

44. KRAC, “Concerns by Kinsale Road.”

45. The Journal, “Why Have 16 Children Died?”

46. Ghanim, “Thanatopolitics,” 67.

47. See Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus for a critique of the occlusion of race in Agamben.

48. Lentin and McVeigh, After Optimism?, 51–5.

49. Agamben, “We Refugees.”

50. Walters, “Acts of Demonstration,” 188.

51. Ibid.

52. The Hungarians were Ireland’s first group of “programme refugees”. Ireland later accepted a group of Chilean refugees (1972), Vietnamese “boat people” (1979), Baha’is (1985) and Bosnians (1992), who, Halilovic-Pastuovic argues, were not satisfactorily integrated, resulting in their leading a transnational existence, between Ireland and Bosnia.

53. Ward, “Ireland and Refugees,” 42.

54. Lentin, “There is No Movement,” 51–6.

55. Mulhall and Titley, “Direct Provision is a Holding Pen.”

56. Walters, “Acts of Demonstration.”

57. Mulhall and Titley, “Direct Provision is a Holding Pen.”

58. Hesse, “Introduction: Un/settled Multiculturalism.”

59. Yúdice, Expediency of Culture.

60. Titley, “Pleasing the Crisis.”

61. Holland, “Stuck in Ireland’s Hidden Villages.”

62. Cullen, “Irish Pro-migrant Nongovernmental Organisations,” 123.

63. Lentin, “There is No Movement.”

64. For example O’Brien, “Over 1,500 Asylum Seekers.”

65. Lentin and McVeigh, After Optimism?, 178.