CHILDREN of refugees and asylum seekers have spent much of their young lives living in accommodation where they are at risk, often malnourished and coping with unnatural circumstances that could leave them with mental health problems.
Those were some of the stark facts outlined at a conference in Limerick this week.
There are 50 children living in accommodation in Limerick provided for asylum seekers by the state and local migrant’s rights organization Doras Luimni stresses that the facts as outlined in the Refugee Council’s most recent report apply nationally.
The organization is making no comment on the Limerick facilities, although they state that general living conditions in this type of provision are far from ideal.
Leonie Kerins, one of the organisers of the ‘Invisible Children’ campaign, which took place on Tuesday in County Hall, said that the findings are that in many centres, children are “sharing toilets and bathrooms with non-family members, they have no control or choice about what they eat and many are malnourished. Catering is often unresponsive to their cultural or religious needs,”
She told the Limerick Post that being in a centre impacts on every area of the children’s lives, with whole families often accommodated in a single room.
“They often eat all their meals in their room. There is no possibility of the kind of play and social interaction most children enjoy. They can’t go to birthday parties or invite friends home, they can’t take part in activities outside the basic schoolwork because there’s no money to buy equipment or pay for extras.
“Their parents have no opportunity to cook meals for them and they never experience seeing their parents get up and go to work. And, because the process takes so long, for many of these children, this is the only life, the only reality they know.”
Living in the centre means there is no quiet place for homework and many of the children live in fear of deportation. The refugee council says that the “unnatural” living conditions could lead to depression and mental health problems.
“The biggest problem with families being accommodated in this kind of institutionalised setting is the lenght of time they spend there. Either the system of dealing with applications for asylum needs to to be streamlined or it needs to go back to a situation where families are catered for in private rented accommodation and given a reasonable allowance to look after themselves,’ Ms. Kerins explained.
