As a 16-year-old student and his mother join thousands of other failed asylum seekers in hiding, the Government is planning to revamp the whole system, writes JAMIE SMYTH
BOLA ADENIRAN is supposed to return to Balbriggan Community College to begin studying for his Leaving Certificate this week.
He won’t be attending. Instead, the Nigerian schoolboy (16) has gone into hiding at an undisclosed location as he attempts to evade a deportation order that would see him returned to his home country.
“I feel much more Irish than Nigerian. I’ve been living here since March 2005 and have spent five years in the school system, making friends and integrating into the community,” says Bola.
“I don’t feel good about breaking the law and running from the immigration authorities. I’m usually the good guy at my school and in the community. I’m the one people usually can trust and look up to and now I’m hiding out and possibly putting friends who help me at risk,” he says.
I first spoke to Bola in July when I visited Mosney to report on a move by the Reception and Integration Agency to transfer 109 asylum seekers to Dublin.
His father Abdul was clearly desperate and pushed his way to the front of a queue of people who were eager to talk to a journalist about their asylum case or the conditions at the centre, which they nicknamed “the cage”.
“Please, is there anything you can do to help my family? We all have deportation orders and have lost our court appeals. My son is an honours student and if he is sent back to Nigeria everything he has done will be lost. They will take us soon,” his father said.
A few weeks later immigration authorities bundled Abdul on to an aircraft to Lagos. The deportation order he had received a year earlier following the rejection of his claim for asylum had finally been effected by the Garda National Immigration Bureau.
“I haven’t spoken to my father since then and I’m really worried about him,” says Bola. “But I don’t want to go back to Nigeria. I can’t remember anything about the place.”
Bola and his mother, Olabisi, were visiting friends on the day the immigration authorities deported his father. When they heard what had happened they did what thousands of failed asylum seekers have done over the past decade: they went underground.
Department of Justice figures compiled by The Irish Timesshow that 3,680 of the 16,799 people served with deportation orders since January 2000 have been deported.
The Government has no idea where the vast majority of the remaining people go. In a reply to a recent Dáil question, Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern said many people served with deportation orders leave the State without telling the authorities.
This is disputed by former Fine Gael justice spokesman Denis Naughten TD, who says there is no evidence to support the theory. “My concern is people are living here illegally, working in the black economy and attempting to gain residence through other means . . . You have to have an effective deportation system in place in order to maintain an effective immigration system,” he says.
Deportation is widely recognised as an important tool to enable Governments to control State borders. Failure to remove people living illegally in a country leaves taxpayers open to abuse and may pose a security risk given the potential threat from global terrorism. It may also act as a “pull factor”, attracting illegal immigrants to the State in greater numbers, thereby limiting resources and public sympathy for genuine refugees fleeing persecution.
But non-governmental organisations advocating on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees argue that the way the asylum system operates here renders deportation unjust in many instances.
“It is perfectly legitimate to return people to their countries of origin if there is a robust, fair and efficient asylum system in place. Our concern is that just isn’t the case,” says Sue Conlan, chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council. “We are concerned some people could be deported to countries where they may be in danger, given the low number of people granted refugee status,” she says.
In the past 2½ years, three people have been deported to Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo – both very unstable countries. There has also been a consistent fall in the number of people granted refugee status in recent years, prompting the United Nations refugee agency to criticise as “low” the current 4 per cent acceptance rate for refugees on their initial application.
“Many people integrate into Irish life as they wait years for a decision. Often it takes years to effect a deportation order. Good practice suggests in these cases a review should take place before someone is sent back,” Ms Conlan says.
Mr Ahern says long delays are typically the result of successive legal appeals by asylum seekers against the decision of the immigration authorities to reject an application for protection. But NGOs argue that asylum seekers can only operate within the legal system set up by the Government.
The Government says the Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill will streamline the asylum system by creating a single procedure to decide claims for refugee status and claims for other forms of protection at the same time. This should speed up decision-making and reduce the possibility of lengthy judicial reviews.
The Bill also allows for summary deportation, which would remove the two-week period given to all people handed deportation orders to prepare a legal appeal. This latter proposal is controversial and will be hotly debated in the Dáil during the autumn.
But for the thousands of failed asylum seekers facing deportation, such as Bola, the new law will not end their dilemma: after spending several years integrating into their Irish communities, should they take their chances and go on the run; flee to another EU state; or return to their home country?
Series concludes on Wednesday