The European Migration Network (EMN) released its report this month on Irish reception facilities for asylum seekers, and it doesn’t make for pleasant reading.

Funded by the EU to provide current information on European migration and asylum, the EMN’s report considers conditions in Ireland’s ‘direct provision’ centres, as well as State practices in addressing pressures on the system, the flow of applicants and relative costs.

Under the direct provision system, asylum seekers are given room and board, and receive a weekly allowance of €19.10 per adult and €9.60 per child, a rate that has gone unchanged since 2000.

Asylum applicants are not entitled to receive social welfare support, such as medical cards, nor or they permitted to take employment.

Of the 30 states within the European Economic Area, Ireland is one of only two that refuses asylum seekers the right to work during their application process. Justice Minister Alan Shatter has claimed in the past that changing this policy would “almost certainly have a profoundly negative impact on application numbers”.

Ireland has also chosen not to adopt either the EU or European Parliament’s directives that set minimum requirements regarding the reception of asylum seekers.

The result is a reception system that’s inconsistently monitored, and one that the EMN report says “has been described as resulting in social exclusion and poverty, particularly in the case of children.”

It’s also one where many people are held for extended periods. As of 2012, 59 per cent of residents had been in the direct provision system for over three years, with some awaiting word on their applications for much longer.

Conditions are often cramped, with each individual only legally entitled to a personal space of just eight feet by five feet. And self-catering is rare: most residents are provided meals, themselves often a point of criticism, and are not allowed to cook for themselves.

It’s worth noting on the above that Minister Shatter has described asylum seekers in direct provision as not “in the care” of the State, rather that the State “has a duty of care” to such applicants. Moreover, there is apparently “no necessity to change either the direct provision policy itself or its administrative and legal basis”, as the report quotes him.
On the face of it, the findings of the EMN would beg to differ.