On 24 June 2014, I spoke at a seminar The Ethic’s of ‘Home’: Direct Provision, Homelessness and Ireland’s Housing Policies. This seminar, organised by Dr Ronni Greenwood, sought to explore conceptions and meanings of home, in the context of housing and homelessness. My paper, The Rights of Others: Asylum Seekers and Direct Provision in Ireland sought to explore the difficulties in rights based approaches to the social and economic rights of asylum seekers, those treated as ‘others’ within and by Irish society. President Michael D. Higgins, speaking earlier this month, noted:
[T]he national appropriation of ‘human rights’ – their entanglement with citizenship – has given rise to new categories of persons without rights, such as refugees, displaced and stateless persons. How are we to conceive of the rights of these people, whose number is in the millions in the world today?
For at least the third time over the last 12 months, the system of direct provision is currently under sustained media scrutiny (see here, here, here and here). (It should be noted that the system has been under the scrutiny and condemnation from many human rights organisations for the past 14 years). This paper seeks to ponder on whether asylum seekers in Ireland truly enjoy “the right to have rights”. You can access my full paper here: The Rights of Others: Asylum Seekers and Direct Provision in Ireland. The slides from my presentation are available here: UL Ethics Seminar-The Rights of Others: Asylum Seekers & Direct Provision in Ireland.