The Irish Government’s Public Housing Bonanza for Asylum Seekers

With a foreword written in Albanian, Urdu and Georgian, as well as welcoming introductions by Micheál Martin and Roderic O’Gorman, the long anticipated White Paper laying out the State’s plan to end the Direct Provision system for asylum seekers dropped this week.

With its card marked by the Programme for Government, Direct Provision (DP) and the mania against it have been a source of wonder for this writer and co. While lamented as our generation’s version of the Magdalene laundries, DP is better described as a warehousing effort for largely bogus, if not entirely cynical, asylum seekers. What most on the Left think it is an institution which locks up benighted people of colour, it is in actual fact an entry point for what most in the Department of Justice know to be blatant frauds.

Case in point is an inspection of both the nationalities applying for asylum, and their respective rejection rates over the past few years. Top heavy with Albanians and Georgians since the easing of travel restrictions from the two nations in 2017, what is striking about any statistical reading on those applying to Direct Provision is the fact that the majority do arrive from safe countries with acceptance rates as low as 1% for some nationalities.

While there have been some half-hearted attempts to clean up the process by preventing the submittance of Albanians and Georgians applications, 2020 was still dominated by what are clearly safe nations in the form of Nigerians and South Africans.

Hosted in a variety of retrofitted hotels and holiday camps, DP is frankly a cut above what is to be expected from average student accommodation at the present time, and by any measure perfectly acceptable for a nation experiencing a housing catastrophe, yet still willing to fulfill its humanitarian commitment to asylum seekers.

With an alphabet soup of Government agencies operating it, as well as avaricious lawyers making a killing through repeated applications to prevent deporations, DP has become a cause célèbre for open borders NGOs scrambling to find evidence of structural racism in Ireland. 

To be clear, DP at its heart a network of dodgy hotels hosting a majority of duplicitous asylum seekers wanting access to the Irish labour and welfare market. Since 2018 the system itself has been boiling over, with many high-profile acts of defiance by local communities against the planting of refugees in local hotels, alongside the expected accusations of far right involvement coming as a result.

In response to this drama, and constant PR attacks against the system by the NGO-Left, the Government has responded by farming out policy making to an Advisory Group made up of left-leaning figures, which responded by publishing the so-called ‘Day Report’, laying out the plans for directing asylum seekers into public housing.

It is not conjecture to assume that these proposals will wreak severe damage on public housing supply, with the Department of Housing resolutely stating that the plans would inflict shortages on housing supply and prioritise foreign asylum seekers over Irish citizens. Even more recently, The Burkean reported on documents revealed to us, showing the tension between various departments and local housing agencies trying to source accommodation for new arrivals. 

The White Paper released this week is largely the product of the Day Report and years of open borders lobbying, with the key points as follows:

• Initial arrivals to Ireland will stay at not-for-profit ‘Reception and Integration Centres’ for no more than 4 months, before being transferred to ‘own door’ or ‘own accommodation’ properties.

• The process will be enacted over a period of 3 years and divided into 2 phases. The first phase will involve applicants staying at 6 integration centres for medical and vulnerability assessments, while the second phase will involve them being provided with state-funded housing.

• The housing itself will be custom built by housing agencies or be repurposed from pre-existing or unused commercial property. Additionally some rental arrangements will be made with families being provided with individual houses and apartments while single applicants will be granted ‘own room’ accommodation sharing with others.

• Throughout Phase 2 of the process, applicants will have full access to Irish labour and welfare system, being paid ‘income support payments’.

• The White Paper makes some provision to prevent against the rampant issue of people trafficking, which most accept as being a constant issue in the DP system as well as transgender and LGBT applicants

• Funding for the new measures will come from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) and with the Housing Finance Agency, 

• No new provision is made towards the deportation of failed asylum seekers beyond offering voluntary repatriations.

• While Ireland has been processing over 4,000 asylum applications per annum recently the new model is designed to cope with 3,500 applications per year. Incidentally should birthright citizenship be ratified as intended in the Oireachtas one could very well expect that 4,000 figure balloon to be closer to 10,000 as was seen in early 2000s.

• With initial capital expenditure expected to come to potentially €670 million, very little treatment is given to the annual cost of the new asylum regime overall.

Overview of the new asylum with regards the sourcing of accommodation to provide for asylum seekers.

If the Irish State wished to formulate a strategy to propel the tide of working class nativism and sow the seeds for eventual populism it was this White Paper. Do not underestimate the long-term impact of this report down the years. We are starting to see the bubbling up of diversity-related incidents on the periphery suburbs of Dublin, Balbriggan being the most notable.

In 2019 it was reported that just under 70,000 people were on the national social housing waiting lists nationwide, and many waiting several years for housing provision. With building rates plummeting 90% due to the pandemic, the State has only been managing the completion of 4,200 homes even before the crisis in 2018.

Add to this the fact that 30-40% of public housing lists consist of foreign born individuals in Dublin alone, one can see the very obvious social crisis the State is sleepwalking into.

Harangued for years by irrational coverage and ire shown towards the DP system, our political regime are promising housing to effectively any asylum seeker who arrives on our shore within 4 months of touching down. Instead of addressing the issue at hand of asylum fraud we are instead directing these frauds to compete with and displace working class communities.

To placate our open borders lobby the Irish State has taken the pin out of a grenade in terms of housing and asylum. The years of endless whinging by Left activists and NGOs will result in one thing and one thing only, not a fair and equitable solution to asylum policy, but the dissolution of working class communities already thrown under the bus by economic shifts the past decade. 

Just prior to covid, we witnessed the first expressions of disquiet over housing and migration with protests in West Dublin, with a recession on the way and an establishment totally unhinged with regards immigration, expect similar scenes in the years to come,

This morning State propaganda outlets and various hangers on are decrying scenes of what they call right-wing street violence on Dublin’s streets following a day of clashes between anti-lockdown protestors and Gardaí. Does the same regime expect this tide of growing discontent to dissipate when it is doling out public housing, hand over fist, to bogus asylum seekers in working class areas of Fingal, Tallaght and Blanchardstown?

By actioning these measures the State has left these communities with one response only: Populism.