Sarah Clancy: Clare has welcomed thousands, but what happened this week is inexcusable
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This week, a community from the townland of Inch, a reasonably well off looking place five miles or so from Ennis, have taken it upon themselves to blockade a road and the entrances to a privately-owned premises which the State has contracted as emergency accommodation for people who have come to Ireland seeking protection.
The locals do not want the premises to operate as an emergency centre. Or, as one woman shouted in my car window: "We don’t want them here!".
This blockade, on a public road, is also operating as a checkpoint with locals deciding who may enter and who may not, in full view of the 29 men placed there by the Government. The men have mixed levels of English and so may not be getting every word that’s said, but the visuals are clear. A group of people are objecting to their presence.
They know it. In fact, they know it so well that some of them set off on foot with their bags to try to get out of there.
For the last seven years, I’ve lived and worked in Co Clare. Through my work with community groups, I’ve seen first-hand what it has been like when all sorts of people seeking protection — refugees, Ukrainians and those seeking international protection — have arrived in our communities.
It’s often been chaotic. It hasn’t always been popular. But in some cases it has been really popular, with the people of Miltown Malbay, for example, treating newcomers like welcome celebrities and knocking more craic out of their stay in the town than 10 Willie Clancy festivals.
Around Clare, thousands of people have been involved in small or large ways in making migrants welcome.
We’ve also had, and have still, our fair share of far-right demonstrators trying to rile people up against migrants. They’ve never succeeded in getting it to take hold in Clare before. This week, for the first time, I am worried that they might.
Moving migrants into communities has been badly managed by government before. It has been badly managed more often than well managed. Community workers and volunteers have been in ridiculous situations — driving around at night trying to wake up people to borrow bottles for newborn babies whose parents arrived with nothing at all except the clothes they stood up in, to an accommodation centre in the countryside with no supplies.
A friend had to round up a group of local women (it was women, this is not sexism) on spec, to cook food in a community centre where people had been sent as emergency accommodation and where there was neither food provided nor a shop to buy it in.
In hundreds of ways, community groups, individual volunteers, and under-resourced community organisations stepped into the breach caused by the inhumane direct provision and protection system. They have gone above and beyond to turn chaos into welcome.
Everyone who is involved in any way can understand the trepidation that must be felt by the people arriving in communities they know nothing about. We might know that places like Kilbaha or Ballyvaughan are mostly safe, quiet communities, but if you’re from a city and you arrive on a bus in either place at night, it has to feel like you’ve landed on Mars.
I can only imagine what it feels like when you’ve been several years in a hotel room shared with others, living in an institution in a place not of your choosing that, despite its shortcomings, is your only home.
It’s a horror to think that between homeless people, international protection applicants, and those displaced from Ukraine that we have somewhere around 75,000 people, including children, living in such institutions.
One thing you can say for the Irish State is it loves an institution.
Over the winter months we’ve seen tents erected in Knockalisheen Direct Provision Centre "for a temporary period", but still today "housing" more than 100 people and we’ve seen up to 500 international protection applicants at a time given no accommodation at all, not even access to homeless shelters.
These people, apart from whatever vulnerabilities they may individually have, are here legally seeking protection and are the responsibility of the State. We saw last weekend how a group of these men who’d decided very logically to camp outside the International Protection Office, (the place responsible for managing their cases) came under threat.
Threatening international protection applicants and burning their tents is criminal and inexcusable. But the men should not have had to be there in danger. The State is failing in its legal obligations to protect them.
The housing crisis and the crisis of the profit-driven direct provision system long predate the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. This Government committed to ending the practice of direct provision for international protection applicants by 2024, as well as to making a range of changes to ameliorate the damage and trauma being caused by that system. Getting this agreed took a decade of work by many groups, including the grassroots group MASI.
Now, not only have we not ended the inhumane system, unfortunately we have extended it, and I can see no end in sight.
Our communities in Clare and around Ireland have their own unmet needs.
In Clare, we lack public services. There isn't sufficient or regular enough public transport. We have serious deprivation in our communities and, in fact — as recent research for the organisation I work for demonstrated — socio-economic rights are not fulfilled in Clare on an equal basis to other counties.
We’ve 50% fewer dentists and 33% fewer doctors than the national average. We have a crisis at all levels of housing — public, social, and private rental, alongside a 17% vacancy rate.
What we really have is a failure to invest sufficiently in the growing population of Clare by national government. It’s understandable that people feel aggrieved about these issues. They should. This service and infrastructure deprivation is the direct responsibility of government.
We are really lucky that these inequalities and failures have not yet led to people turning on each other.
The failures of this and previous governments to meet the basic socio-economic rights of the people in our communities — whether indigenous or recently arrived — is, in any case, inexcusable. It is helping to cause social tension and a fertile ground for the type of polarisation we have seen in other countries.
We are a very wealthy country, in theory, yet our governments choose again and again to act as a go-between for capital, allowing it to speculate on the population’s unmet needs instead of investing directly in providing and servicing those needs.
These are real failures. They have effects and they have consequences. They also mean that to most ordinary people, it appears as if the Government has no clue as to what happens after people are sent to unsuitable accommodation in their communities. We need leadership around this and, yes, we need investment. Houses don’t build themselves.
However, none of this creates a license for communities to take this out on other groups. Most sound, decent people know this instinctively.
The Government here and much of the media have diligently played down the threats presented by far right groups in Ireland. We’ve seen elected officials right up to the Taoiseach using language that dehumanises and denies the legality of international protection applicants' right to be in the State.
All the while, people from minority groups have been experiencing the effects of these groups. Just this week, because of speaking out against the blockade in Clare and to try to describe the kindness and solidarity people have shown in other communities in the county, I’ve been called a globalist lesbian, she/he/it, that yoke, LGBTQ+ NGO Girl, too ugly to fuck, and more.
My colleagues and I have been threatened that "all of Dublin will be brought down" on top of us if we don’t "leave those farmers alone".
The Government, and most of the Opposition — including this week both the Social Democrats and Sinn Féin — have acted as if there is a justification for a community being consulted on who lives in it. We can’t appease these types of sentiments. It’s obvious why. All the major parties need to give decent leadership around migration.
We also need them to start showing communities that they have a plan. Not a five-point election campaign, but a plan for how we get people out of hotels and into homes. All the people, all of our own people, wherever they came here from.
Migration is not a crisis. It has been a feature of all human existence, and in this century will increase.
We need to start getting it right. No human is illegal.