1.1 Direct Provision in Ireland and the Global Politics of Exclusion
In September 2018,1 there were 5955 people living in accommodation centres all over Ireland (Reception and Integration Agency (RIA) September 2018)—former hotels, hostels, army barracks2 and caravan parks. This number includes not only people who were waiting for their claims to be processed, but also those who have been granted status but are unable to leave due to lack of housing. Many of these people have escaped torture and persecution, or have run from life-threatening situations in order to attempt to create better lives for themselves and their families. 41% of these (2441 people) (RIA September 2018) were waiting for over two years, and many for longer: six, seven, eight years for some. Reduced to ‘sixty nine numbers ’3 instead of names, they wait in an institutional limbo for a final decision on their claims. Fed and housed through the Direct Provision system, these people are kept on the margins of society, unable (until 2018) to access employment or for most, third-level education , and forced to live a ‘life without choice’ (Nic Giolla Choille 2010). They are simultaneously inside and outside: inside a system which controls their everyday life and decisions, and yet kept outside of mainstream society in Ireland, prevented from integrating through a series of deliberate measures.
Direct Provision centres in Ireland have been described as ‘total institutions’ by scholars, drawing on Goffman (Loyal 2011; Nedeljkovic 2018). They are the ultimate expression of ‘hostipitality ’, Derrida’s intertwining of ‘hospitality ’ and ‘hostility’, based on their shared Latin root, evoking the idea of the undesirable guest, received with a hospitality which is lined with barely concealed hostility (Derrida 2000). Many people living in the Direct Provision system are consumed by the uncertainty and boredom of this in-between institutional existence, and for many, this is coupled with loss, trauma and the sense of dislocation and confusion that accompanies being uprooted suddenly from one’s place and life and being flung headlong into an alien world, as evoked by John Berger’s description of the experience of migration:
Emigrer signifie toujours démanteler le centre du monde, et l’aménager dans un monde confus, désorganise et fragmentaire. (Berger 1985: unpaginated)[To migrate always means to dismantle the centre of the world and to recreate it in a confusing, disorganized and fragmented world—my translation]
Mental illness and depression are rife (Chineyre 2011; Ní Raghallaigh et al. 2016; Murphy et al. 2018; Nwachukwu et al. 2009; Stapleton 2012), the uncertainty exacerbated by shared and often cramped living accommodation, often with strangers, being unable to cook or to choose when to eat and being unable to make the choices and decisions that most people in Ireland take for granted. Long periods of waiting for claims to be processed lead not only to an agonizing and wasted existence for those waiting , but to enormous costs for the Irish state, which pays private companies to accommodate and cater for these people, at large profit.
Direct Provision is the main system in Ireland which accommodates people seeking asylum. Established in November 1999 as an ‘emergency measure’ to deal with the increasing numbers of people seeking asylum at this time, the system was implemented in April 2000 and was originally designed to accommodate people for up to six months while their claims were being processed. Twenty years later, it is still the main system in place .
Direct Provision and the politics of exclusion in Ireland do not stand alone. They are part of a broader global picture of exclusion of certain categories of migrant deemed disposable, surplus. They are part of a global politics of securitization and criminalization of certain categories of migrant, an increasing ‘necropolitics ’ (Mbembe 2003) which dictates who may live and who may die, whose lives are valid and worth saving, and whose are surplus, disposable. Direct Provision is also part of an increasing global network of camps, detention centres, holding centres and various other spaces located on, between and within borders where people seeking protection, safety and better lives are forced to wait for varying amounts of time, their lives on hold while they wait for decisions from outside, above. While spaces of waiting fill out border zones, increasingly such spaces are also found within borders , more often than not hidden from the public eye. Such spaces include detention or holding centres where people are held and various forms of accommodation centres where people can come and go with limited freedoms, such as Direct Provision centres, reception centres and camps. What is common between them is that they are spaces where movement is halted and people wait and lives are on hold and freedom is curtailed to varying extents. Camps, holding centres, detention centres and Direct Provision centres are concrete and spatial manifestations of the politics of exclusion . They are symbolic of intentional exclusion , disempowerment and control. However, they may also be spaces of resistance , solidarity and strength, the people living within them creating networks, accessing grassroots resources and continuing to be active agents of their own lives in whatever ways they can.
Representations of asylum seekers in mainstream Irish media have fluctuated between invisibility , not representing these people sufficiently or at all, and ‘hypervisibility ’ (Tyler 2006), disproportionate emphasis on asylum seekers, representing them as either victim or threat, and often using alarmist or sensationalist language. While media coverage of Direct Provision and migration to Ireland more generally has improved in recent years, and asylum seekers themselves have become more vocal through processes of self-organization, the voices of asylum seekers are still insufficiently heard in the public realm in Ireland.
1.2 Research in Direct Provision
Between March and July 2010, I coordinated a collaborative visual project with a group of ten people seeking asylum and living in a Direct Provision centre in Ireland. The participants at the time of the project were living in a Direct Provision centre in a medium-sized town.4 They had placed claims for asylum with the Minister of Justice and Equality and were waiting for a final answer on those claims, or on appeals against the rejection of those claims.5 The aims of this research were, firstly, to work collaboratively and creatively with people seeking asylum to explore and better understand the everyday subjective experiences of living in Direct Provision and negotiating the asylum system in Ireland; and secondly, to use the work created through this collaborative process to represent these experiences in ways which might challenge dominant representations and stereotypes, and to contribute to bringing alternative voices on issues around the asylum system into the public realm. Through working collaboratively with asylum seekers living in the Direct Provision system, I aimed to create better understandings of the experiences of living in the ‘semi-permanent temporariness ’ (Bailey et al. 2002: 125) that this system has come to entail, and of the experiences of living with uncertainty on an everyday basis.
The project aimed to create narratives and representations alongside the people involved in the project which could act as ‘counter-narratives’ to mainstream or stereotypical representations, opening a space for the voices of those involved to be heard in the public realm. I sought to explore the experiences of asylum seekers in a way that would look behind or beyond the imposed label or category; rather than simply examining the category of ‘asylum seeker’ and the issues related to it, the project sought to look behind the ‘convenient images’ (Wood 1985, cited in Zetter 1991: 44) that a label creates. Working collaboratively and in a participatory way may help to counter the non-participatory (Zetter 1991) and imposed nature of labels . By working with asylum seekers in Ireland in a participatory and transparent way and finding ways to communicate their experiences to broader audiences, both visually and verbally, the work sought to expose the everyday lived realities of the contradictory and non-transparent processes which keep people who have a legal right to seek protection in Ireland in a state of limbo and economic, cultural and geographical exclusion for long periods of time.
Central to this work is the importance of exploring the micrology of lived subjective experience and everyday life in order to better understand how approaches to keeping out the ‘other’ are manifested and experienced on the ground and in specific places and contexts. Simplistic or homogenizing representations can ignore the complexity of individual lives and subjectivities, as well as differences in culture, background and education . Even if they are refugee -centred in their approach, such representations may serve to create more emphasis on the label of asylum seeker, stripping asylum seekers of individual identities and complexities of experience, as well as the ways in which people seeking asylum negotiate imposed labels . As anthropologist Michael Jackson asks:
To what extent do we, in the countries of immigration, unwittingly reduce refugees to objects, ciphers and categories in the way we talk and write about them, in roughly the same way that indiffe...