You can find my preliminary analysis, including a full summary of the core recommendations from the McMahon Report on the Protection Process and Direct Provision System here.
You can access the McMahon Report here.
From an initial reading and examination of this report, in my view, this is a report of two halves. One half of the report (Chapter 3 in particular) on the protection process and recommendations on the five-year grant of a form of residency status are clear and coherent. Clear recommendations are made as regards status determination and a substantial analysis of the rights of the child (along with other areas). That is not to say that the narrative of the McMahon Report in Chapter 3 is not without its issues (but I will leave this for another day). Throughout Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, highly qualified language and significant caveats infects the totality of recommendations on direct provision accommodation and ancillary supports.
Human Rights Obligations and Direct Provision Accommodation and Supports
From my initial reading of the report, there appears to be two unequivocal recommendations that may impact on those currently in direct provision, who are not resident in the centres for five years: an increase in direct provision allowance and the provision of a locker for each individual adult in direct provision accommodation centres. All other recommendations are subject to significant caveats as regards contractual obligations and implementation restricted in so far as reasonably practicable. For over 15 years, report after report has emphasised the significant violations of human rights that occur on a daily basis for those subject to direct provision accommodation and supports. The McMahon Report, while recommending an increase in direct provision allowance, does not recommend the payment of child benefit to those seeking protection in Ireland.
In my preliminary analysis (available here, pp. 19-26), I argue that the Working Group should have taken into account Ireland’s international obligations, in particular the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. By not doing so, the McMahon Report entrenches the notion that asylum and protection seekers are less than human, deserving of only the most highly qualified rights in highly institutionalised settings.
2 Embedding Institutional Living in Direct Provision (see further, pp. 26-31, here)
The recommendations on living conditions and ancillary supports leave much to be desired. The solution to greater protection of protection seekers lies in neither in law nor in strategic litigation. While these are important in achieving broader aims and seeking to use law to promote human rights; only a fundamental re-evaluation of society’s approach to protection seekers in Ireland will result in the recognition of, what Arendt terms, “the right to have rights.” To date law and administration, and now the McMahon Report, will be used to justify exclusion, separation and distancing of protection seekers from Irish society and placing people in the direct provision system. Until there is more fundamental societal introspection, on “the rights of others”, institutionalised and impoverished living for protection seekers will continue. The significant controls over living conditions, eating arrangements’, near total supervision of the parental role, are relatively unchallenged by the McMahon Report. While there are some soft recommendations “in so far as practicable, and subject to any contractual obligations” as regards family living quarters, allocation of rooms to single applicants, possibility for individual or communal cooking, no other societal group has such enforced supervision of intimate aspects of daily lives. Public support for political action in limiting social rights of protection seekers have seen the most restrictive and punitive forms of control utilised within social welfare provision in the modern era.
Liam Thornton 