Sir, - After reading Padraig O'Morain's heartfelt response to the closure of the Refugee Application Centre last week (Opinion, November 11th), I thought it might be worth reminding readers that in the UK we too have a highly negative attitude to asylum-seekers, with legislation just coming on to our statute book that renders asylum-seekers subject to distribution to centres around the country, without concern for their networks with others from their country of origin, and gives them vouchers for the barest necessities of life, with minute amounts of cash.
All countries in the EU have now to think hard about their attitudes to genuine asylum-seekers, and ask themselves whether they live up either to the letter or the spirit of their international obligations to asylum-seekers. They need to examine their appeal systems and support systems, so that the fake asylum-seekers are weeded out, and the genuine ones are welcomed with kindness as they flee from torture and other horrors.
As the child of a German Jewish refugee mother, I heard tales of unbelievable kindness and only a little hostility in London of the 1930s. Ireland has its huge diaspora, many of the members of which have received great kindness and a huge welcome wherever they have gone around the world. As someone who is British, Jewish, of refugee origins, and a part-time blow-in here in Ireland, I wonder if my Irish friends have realised just how appalling the life of a genuine asylum-seeker can be - and, if they have, why the legendary and glorious tradition of Irish hospitality has not been extended to the most dispersed of all comers, genuine asylum-seekers? - Yours, etc.,
Julia Neuberger, Schull, Co Cork.