Dr Mark Mellett Vice Admiral, Dr Mark Mellett was Ireland’s highest ranking military officer, Government’s Principal Military Advisor and member of the National Security Committee and the EU Military Committee. He now runs his own company Green Compass advocating for sustainability and is Board Chair of the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority and Sage Advocacy. INTRODUCTION… Read more »

Eugene Quinn and David Moriarty Eugene Quinn is National Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) Ireland, a position he has held since 2006. He was Chair of the Limerick Integration Working Group 2010-22. He was a member of the McMahon Working Group on the Protection Process, which reported to Government in June 2015. From… Read more »

Unaddressed social issues are the bedrock upon which extremist actors have been able to incite racism and
violence against migrants.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from
adversity, adapt to challenges, and recover
from setbacks. While Dublin City Council
workers cleaned up the streets after the
riots and restored the physical space, Home
Visitors were addressing the emotional and
mental trauma experienced by children and
families and supporting them to recover
from these awful events.

In 2006, in the North-East Inner-City of Dublin alone, the scale of the change in the religious landscape was staggering and evident to those paying attention.

Several of the women I speak to tell me they were in Direct Provision for more than five years. They have had children in that time, children who still do not know anything other than sharing just one room with their family in an overcrowded centre full of people. When you have lived in an institution for a long period of time, the constraints can start to feel like safety. One woman tells me that she has had her papers for a couple of months and is preparing for the move out of the centre, but her relief at leaving is tinged with trepidation. At least in the centre, she says, there are always others to turn to, but “nobody looks out for you outside.”

Global threats to human security and safety require a global response. On 17 December 2018, the UN General Assembly affirmed the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR).[16] The main objectives of the GCR are to: ease pressures on countries that welcome and host refugees; build self-reliance of refugees; expand access to resettlement in third countries; and support conditions in countries of origin for safe return. Undoubtedly, the GCR has admirable goals and a vision to effect positive change for refugees and forcibly displaced persons worldwide. However, the challenge is to ensure the high-level commitments translate into actions that address the needs on the ground and impact positively on the lives of forced migrants and their families.

That is the way we should be thinking about the planetary crisis, in terms of new opportunities for rethinking the good life, rethinking human relationships with each other, rethinking human relationships with the earth, and so on at this time. Contrast this to the dominant public discussion of this issue in terms of framing it (and therefore delimiting it) to a continuation of business as usual. The effect of this is to maintain capitalism, consumerism, and our lifestyles as they are now, but perhaps drawing on renewable energy to do so.

Humans, it seems, cannot inhabit our status of insider without framing it against outsiders. This is one of the reasons why we should be sceptical of easy claims grounded in concepts like inclusion and tolerance – not because those are not virtuous things to achieve – but because if we believe we arrive at them without difficulty we are deluded.

As the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has recorded, between 1990 and 2010 there was a fairly consistent level of global forced displacement of between 30-50 million people per annum. However, the past 10 years have seen a significant increase in all forms of forced displacement, defined by UNHCR as displacement resulting from “persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.”