Readers of a certain age and background will remember limbo. It was, in Catholic Church teaching, the place for those who died before being baptised, and were therefore ineligible to apply for residency in heaven, but who were also innocent of any sin, and could not, in conscience, be sent to hell or purgatory, writes Fintan O'Toole.
The concept was rather an embarrassment and it was gradually allowed to lapse. But just as the church was letting limbo slip away, the State decided to spend a vast amount of money and effort on bringing it back. Limbo is now the place or state where those who come to Ireland seeking asylum are confined. We have constructed a cruel, stupid and dreadfully wasteful system of dealing with asylum seekers, one that demeans both us and them. And we now have the opportunity to stop it.
The asylum problem is essentially over. It is fair to acknowledge that, in the mid and late 1990s, the State was taken by surprise by the relatively sudden jump in the numbers of people arriving on our shores and asking to be granted refugee status.
Mechanisms for dealing with these claims, and for accommodating the people making them in the meantime, had to be constructed quickly, and in an atmosphere of panic. The combination of hysteria and inadequate structures inevitably led to chaos, which in turn created more hysteria. The State's response was confused, paranoid and often incompetent.
This period of chaos should be long over. Even if we accept the hysterical exaggerations of the problem a few years ago, it is obvious that asylum is now a pretty small issue. Since 2001, asylum applications worldwide have dropped by 40 per cent. In Europe, asylum application levels decreased by 21 per cent, from 396,800 in 2003 to 314,300 in 2004. The 25 European Union countries recorded a 19 per cent drop in asylum requests last year. Ireland is very much part of this trend. Asylum seeking peaked here at 11,630 applications in 2002. It fell to 7,900 in 2003, and by a further 40 per cent to just 4,770 last year.
We could spend a long time debating why this has happened. The Government, presumably, would claim that the dramatic fall in numbers is due to its tough policies. This is highly unlikely. The downward trend is not unique to Ireland but is being felt around the world. And it long predates the Government's most ostentatious measures, such as the citizenship referendum. If anything, indeed, the sharp downward trend makes the referendum look even more like an ill-considered over-reaction. But, in any case, the reasons for the fall are less important than the basic fact that we now have far less than half the number of asylum seekers that we had three years ago. About 1 per cent of the world's would-be refugees is currently ending up on our shores. There is one asylum applicant for every thousand members of the population. If asylum is a burden, it is now a very light one.
In this context, why do we need a system that is both pointlessly cruel and woefully expensive? The logic of being hard-faced and inflicting real suffering on people was to create a deterrent. I don't accept that logic, but from the Government's point of view, it has worked. If Bertie Ahern and Michael McDowell really want a triumph, let them proclaim this one as a great victory over the bleeding-heart liberals who would have allowed us to be swamped by so many asylum seekers that the island would have sunk beneath the waves. If that's what it takes for a recognition that the current system makes no sense, then fine. But at least let them accept that things have changed and that cruelty and waste can no longer be justified.
On economic grounds alone, the current system is madness. The Government spent over €1.1 billion on services for asylum seekers over the four-year period to the end of 2003. Perversely, much of this money was spent on being nasty. The "direct provision" policy of keeping asylum seekers in centres is hugely expensive. So, indirectly, is the policy of not allowing them to work. (Countries such as Germany, Holland, Sweden, Austria and Belgium all allow asylum seekers to work within a year of their asylum application being lodged.) So too is the system of reviewing applications which results in many of them being rejected in the first instance and then granted, perhaps a year later, on appeal. This means simply that the State pays to keep people it subsequently accepts as genuine refugees in suspended animation, giving them unnecessary grief and wasting more taxpayers' money.
The current system turns adults into children by making them completely dependent on the State and demands that their children be raised in hostels. It involves backlogs which in turn involve the deportation of adults who have been here for years and of children who know of no other home. It leaves thousands of willing workers, often with very good skills, idle while the Enterprise Strategy Group reckons we need 420,000 new workers by 2010.
Let's end this stupidity by declaring an amnesty for all those who have been here more than two years, clearing the decks and devising a transparent system that does not combine profligacy with meanness.