End Direct Provision – Support the Cahersiveen Hungerstrikers!
Lasair Dhearg stands in solidarity with the Asylum seekers of Skellig Star direct provision Centre in Cahersiveen, Co Kerry who have today embarked on hunger strike over living conditions and food rations.
Residents have had their water and food supplies forcibly rationed, possessing no control over their own meals. In one example: residents are being forced to share 4ltrs of milk between 40 people.
Residents stated that despite a Boil Water Notice being in place in the town due to a recent detection of the parasite cryptosporidium, their bottled water supply has been cut. During the Covid-19 lockdown, each resident received 5ltrs of water per day, but this was reduced to 2ltrs a day per resident until five days ago when the supply of bottled water was stopped. Additionally residents who can’t afford to or are unable to buy their own water (asylum seekers are forbidden to work in Ireland) have to drink boiled tap water instead.
The hunger strikers are demanding to be moved out of the direct provision complex, and transferred to accommodation with access to a social worker and “adequate facilities” where they can have a vulnerability assessment and treatment.
“We have been traumatised, and for us to recover from this we need to be all moved out of this accommodation immediately” stated a spokesperson for the hunger strikers.
The Direct Provision system in Ireland has been built with the intent to be insufferable and dehumanising in order to serve as a warning to refugees and asylum seekers around the globe to not come to Ireland. Their institutions are run as prisons for profit, with millions being payed out by the 26-county government to private companies to staff, maintain and enforce this brutal system.
To prove black lives matter in Ireland, we must dismantle Ireland’s current greatest monument to racism: direct provision.
Victory to the hunger strikers!
