Direct Provision: Asylum, The Academy and Activism

This book examines approaches and responses to working with the asylum-seeking, refugee and migrant communities in Ireland. Through their experiences, analyses and activist accounts, contributors name direct provision as a system that facilitates the marginalization and dehumanizing of people. In making visible some of the undocumented challenges to direct provision, the co-operation and engagement between local and migrant communities, and the very real and moving experiences of living in such conditions, this publication forms a part of the ongoing challenge to direct provision. It calls for a reconsideration of the infallibility of the reductionist-dominant narrative that reduces responsibility to care and protect human life, to narrow economic considerations, and calls on the State to recognize its duty of care in its fullest conceptualization. While analysing through the lens of care, the reductionist and repressive State policies and practices are revealed. Most emphasis is placed on the reactions and resilience of the asylum–seeking community, through their numerous acts of resistance, supported by a significant cohort of friends and activists within and outwith the direct provision system.

Jacqui O’Riordan is a lecturer at the School of Applied Social Studies, University Collge Cork, where she works across a broad range of adult education, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Her research interests embody the activist and academic and focus on a range of issues concerning gender, equality and diversity in local and global contexts. Her research contributions include analyses of aspects of women’s livehihoods; child trafficking; care for children; migrant children’s experiences and interactions of education; community supports for people, younger and older, living with disabilities; as well as the analysis of care and experiences of carers. She is a co–founder of Anti-Deportation Ireland, and has had involvement with migrant and asylum–seeking communities since the 1990s.

Mike FitzGibbon has a background in engineering and in information systems, and began work in development in the early 1990s, later working at the International Famine Centre in UCC and the Higher Education Equality Unit until 2002, working as a development consultant until 2005. Since then, he has lectured on and been a part of the development of the UCC International Development undergraduate degree programme; a joint MSc in Rural Development with universities in Ethiopia; and on UCC’s Masters in Food Security Management programme. He has always had a strong interest in ethics, human rights and development issues, particularly in relation marginalised groups. For the past two decades, he has had a deep involvement with the asylum-seeking and immigrant communities, and help to found Anti-Deportation Ireland, a local movement working with asylum-seekers.