Ireland's White Paper to End Direct Provision and Establish a New International Support Service (2021) and the ‘sticky’ discourse of control

Abstract

The Government of Ireland has published its plan to reorder the infrastructure it uses to accommodate and support migrants seeking International Protection (IP) in Ireland. This policy document - entitled The White Paper to End Direct Provision and Establish a New International Support Service - was published on 26th February, 2021. The White Paper proposes to replace Ireland's current but discredited system with a new IP accommodation and support process – to be entitled Ireland's International Protection Support Service. This new system is intended to “treat all applicants to the process with dignity and respect” (Government of Ireland, 2021: 7). Dissonances exist, however. The discursive framing of the IPSS and the spatialities inherent in the proposals suggest a potential rearticulation of state control rather that a diminution of same. I turn to the work of scholars inspired by Giorgio Agamben to help situate the spatialities of this shift, and suggest that the current ‘white paper’ should simply be seen as a mechanism deployed the Government of Ireland to ensure that its bio-political command and control processes can migrate from the spatially-defined set of control environments currently in effect to a diffuse construction of a spatially networked series of deterritorialised indistinctions.

Introduction

The Government of Ireland has published its plan to reorder the infrastructure it uses to accommodate and support migrants seeking International Protection (IP) in Ireland. This policy document - entitled The White Paper to End Direct Provision and Establish a New International Support Service - was published on 26^th February, 2021 . It is the government's response to a number of recent systemic reviews of policy, in this area (see Government of Ireland, 2015 and 2020). ¹

Ireland currently operates a system of communal accommodation and support for IP applicants. ² This system is commonly termed ‘Dispersal and Direct Provision’ (DP). First implemented in 1999/2000, as a temporary response to the experience of unprecedented immigration, this DP system requires IP applicants seeking social welfare style support to reside in one of 38 communal accommodation centres, whilst their IP application is being assessed. This pattern of “containment as government technique” has been widely criticised (Wacquant, 2010 in Loyal and Quilley, 2016, 81). Whilst public opinion can be mixed, the weight of academic and legal commentary has been negative. Successive academic studies have demonstrated how the restrictive nature of a life spent resident in a DP centre and the slow pace of the Irish IP assessment process combine to preclude IP applicants from leading meaningful lives whilst awaiting a decision on their application. Some suffer greatly – a fact that has been further highlighted during Ireland's COVID-19 experience. Far higher rates of COVID-19 infection have been registered amongst DP residents than amongst the population as a whole (Gusciute, 2020, 239). International commentators such as the UN Human Rights Council, the Council of Europe's Commission Against Racism and Intolerance and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination have been critical as well (see, for example, Murphy et al., 2018, 281). Agamben's (1998) conceptualisation of ‘bare life’ seems to be an apt descriptor of the likely IP applicant experience here. Ireland's existing DP system facilitates the biological realities of the IP applicant's life and priorities them over the experiential quality of the lives that are lived. The IP applicant's possibilities are inevitably subsumed within the wider process of command and control, and side-lined.

The White Paper proposes to replace this largely discredited DP system with a new IP accommodation and support process – to be entitled Ireland's International Protection Support Service (IPSS). This new system is intended to “treat all applicants to the process with dignity and respect” (Government of Ireland, 2021: 7). In this debate, I offer an initial reading of this new policy position and seek to place this IP policy departure against Ireland's broader impulse to manage migration. I draw attention to the standard discourses of migration management that continue to underly this policy platform and suggest that any headline departures from past positions are likely to remain scaffolded by wider matrices of power in the Irish migration management system. Specifically, I suggest that the reorderings implied in the proposed system-shift may simply point to a re-spatialisation of established command and control procedures rather than to a fundamental reconceptualization of same.

Ireland's Proposed international protection and support service (IPSS)

The IPSS will oversee the decommissioning of Ireland's current ‘for-profit’ DP system of communal accommodation and its replacement with a ‘not-for-profit’ pattern of IP accommodation, ‘in the community’. Headline departures from current patterns include proposals to house IP applicants in a range of ‘own-door’ and ‘own-room’ accommodations - beyond the current communal pattern - and to allow IP applicants greater access to the Irish waged labour market, than is currently the case. Furthermore, it is envisaged that the IPSS will be more proactive in its support of IP applicant lives than is presently the case. A wide range of social supports and a suite of enhanced rights and entitlements are to be made available to IP applicants, irrespective of legal status. Key changes will occur in the areas of: health, housing, education and employment. ³

Reflections

A Clear discursive framing is in effect in the White Paper and a newly person-centred infrastructural scaffolding seems to be proposed for Ireland's IP assessment/accommodation/support process (see, for example, Government of Ireland, 2021: 7). However, this White Paper is a complex document and disjunctions exist between the White Paper's headline engagement with ‘human right’ and the wider discursive scaffoldings that seem to remain in place.

Two broad axes of concern come to light. At meta-level, a residual economic framing of migration informs the processes set out in the document and IP applicants continue to be cast as either potential ‘contributors’ or ‘non-contributors’. This does much to destabilise the government's headline engagement with human right. A sensitivity to the spatialities at the heart of the proposed IPSS reordering yields a second axis of concern. I introduce both, in the hope of prompting further debate.

Discourses Of economic migration and governmental control

A less-than-subtle discourse of monetised migration is discernible in the headline statement attributed to An Tanaiste – Leo Varadkar, TD. In this statement, Varadkar moves smoothly from a recognition of the impact that ‘successful’ applicants for international protection have had on “strengthening our economy and enriching our society” through to a recognition of the need for cost-effective and time-efficient systems of assessment, to finish with a strongly neo-liberal contextualisation of the new policy platform in light of Ireland's stated desire to be “open to new talent” (Government of Ireland, 2021: 9). The Government of Ireland may be seeking to ensure that it upholds the rights and entitlements of those subject to its IP applications procedures but the rationale for such an engagement with ‘human rights’ remains anchored in an unreconstructed view of ‘economically-productive’ human movement. Furthermore, an imaginary of justifiable governmental command and control is deployed from the start. Early emphasis is (not unreasonably) given to the need for relevant government departments to “work closely together, along with key stakeholders and communities, to ensure a successful and timely transition to the new model” (Government of Ireland, 2021: 7) but deeper discourses of state control are foregrounded in the document as well. For example, the socially-supportive character of the new IPSS system is firmly set against reiterations of the Government of Ireland; (2021: 50) need to ‘robustly’ assess all applications and develop an “increased level of enforcement and ultimately removals”.

The White Paper may proport to signal the Government of Ireland's intent to institute a person-centred ‘regime of care’ in the IP system, at local level, but the wider framings of the plan suggest that ‘human right’ is unlikely to be valorised over and above managerial control and legal process, and that Ireland's reordered IP process will likely remain scaffolded by wider matrices of governmental power and intent, under the aegis of this proposed IPSS structure.

The Spatialities of Ip ‘management’

With this White Paper, the Government of Ireland is effectively proposing to move its IP accommodation process from a position that currently seeks to corral applicants in a series of spaces on the margins of society to one where IP applicants will be supported to live ‘in’ (and presumably, as part of) the community in general. IP applicants are to be granted a ‘space-to-be’ in Irish society, for the first time - beyond the highly spatially-defined locations they are currently granted. If, through its current reticence to extend the full range of social rights and entitlements to IP applicants, the Government of Ireland effectively casts the IP applicant beyond the Irish nation, and if the spatialities of the current DP system serve to position IP applicants beyond the sites commonly occupied by Irish residents, then the departures implied in this policy-shift signal a volt-face by government and a welcome acceptance of the IP applicant's ‘right-to-be’ in Ireland, irrespective of legal status. There seems much to celebrate – in this geographical realignment. However, a more critical conceptualisation is also possible. This more critical view suggests that the current White Paper does not signal a sea-change in Ireland's engagement with IP at all but may be more productively construed as the Government of Ireland's conscious redeployment of its IP command and control infrastructure – in space. Specifically, the current White Paper's reordering of the point of IP command and control - from DP's spatially-discrete spaces of inclusion/exclusion to IPSS's more spatially diffuse matrix of potential control-experiences in the community – may simply be designed to relocate the Government of Ireland's mechanisms of IP command and control away from a ‘knowable’ series of high profile and geographically ‘locatable’ contexts, to a likely myriad of diffusely networked policy spaces, beyond the public gaze and consequently beyond the reach of much public comment.

Conclusion

Given The clear economic framing of migration presented in the White Paper and emphasis that continues to be placed on wider processes of migration command and control, it is tempting to suggest that the spatialities of the proposed IPSS simply point to a potential rearticulation of state control-matrices rather that a diminution of same. Specifically, and turning to the work of scholars inspired by Giorgio Agamben to help situate the spatialities of this shift, the current ‘white paper’ should simply be seen as a mechanism deployed the Government of Ireland to ensure that its bio-political command and control processes can migrate from the highly spatially-defined set of control environments currently in effect (somewhat akin to Agamben's ‘space of exception’) to his more diffuse construction of a spatially networked series of deterritorialised indistinctions, predicated on the experience of inclusion-exclusion in tension.