A group of men seeking asylum who complained about their state-provided shelter quickly found themselves sleeping rough

Rafat Hamour looks down under the bridge over the Grand Canal, where a few other men are lounging about near shabby tents and scattered cardboard.

“Hi guys,” he hollers in Arabic, waving.

He jogs down the bank, opens up a fence, and slips inside. “Here’s my accommodation,” he says, pointing at one of the tents.

It’s a humid Thursday, 8 August. The air is sticky. Hamour is wearing a black cap, an Adidas jacket, and sneakers. An Arabic tattoo on his forearm says: “تألمت فتعلمت فتغيرت” –  “I suffered, I learned, I changed”.

Inside the barricades, set up to discourage men seeking asylum from pitching tents, Hamour introduced his friends one after another.

Most of them smile, nod, and blush.

Hamour points to a guy, with puffy eyes and a Palestinian flag around his neck like a scarf, and says he’s the most no-nonsense and outspoken among them.

That’s partly why they were all there on Thursday, he says, because that guy complained.

On 4 August, they were shuttled from Balseskin reception centre to an asylum shelter in Dundalk, Hamour had said earlier, sitting at a café on Rathmines Road.

There, they mentioned their medical issues and the medications they take, he said. Most of them have medical conditions.

Hamour has a doctor’s note that says he has serious health problems and needs a room of his own. “He requires periods of uninterrupted sleep,” the note says.

His friend, the one Hamour says is direct, said he didn’t want to share a room with more than five people. Hamour tried to interpret his concerns from Arabic, he says. “It got aggressive, but I was trying to help.”

Staff got annoyed and called them all a cab back to Dublin, says Hamour. “They say, ‘All of you, there’s no beds for you inside here.’”

In Dublin, they went back to Balseskin, but they were turned away, he said. So they moved to the streets.

Asylum seekers can face a take-it-or-leave-it choice when it comes to accommodation that they are offered, even if overcrowded rooms would worsen physical illnesses or mental health problems.

A spokesperson for the Department of Children and Equality – which runs the International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) – said while it can’t comment on individual cases, it is encouraging residents to voice accommodation-related complaints and concerns directly to IPAS rather than centre staff.

IPAS has partnered with an organisation that does outreach and collects the names and details of people sleeping rough who are seeking asylum – it’s prioritising those people for a bed, they said.

“Many people have received offers of accommodation through this process,” the spokesperson said.

On Friday, 9 August, Hamour said in a WhatsApp text that he had just been offered a bed.

By Tuesday, all the men except one of them, who’d decided to leave Ireland for his country of birth, were accommodated.

Still unprepared

Hamour says the group were attacked while sleeping rough along the canal.

He sent pictures on WhatsApp of his friends’ injuries. One shows a man with a gash and dried blood on top of his head.

Attackers threw their tents into the water while he was away from the group, he said.

Hamour shows a photo of their group all sleeping on the ground, out in the open, the evening they lost their tents.

It’s safer to pitch tents inside the barricades, he said. “They protect us.”

A screenshot of a draft of the email to IPAS shared in their group chat repeats the same story: that they were thrown out, they’re ill or injured and have been attacked and are constantly bullied and cursed at on the streets.

“Our pictures have been published on social media sites while we were sitting together,” it says.

John Lannon, CEO of migrants’ rights non-profit Doras, says the grievance procedure at IPAS centres has never been really effective and can leave people feeling unheard – even if Hamour and his friends had directly complained to IPAS about overcrowded conditions.

“Any attempts to bring something to the attention of IPAS is a slow process, and it’s challenging,” he said by phone on Friday.

All of this, he said, is symptomatic of a system that’s never been fit for purpose. It’s overly reliant on private property owners concerned with cutting corners and making good profit, he said, and a system shortsighted in planning for upticks in arrivals.

“There is definitely a need to address the accommodation situation, in terms of overcrowding, the poor conditions, the two and a half thousand people that are on the streets,” he said.

He says he understands the burden of accommodating tens of thousands of Ukrainians after the full-scale Kremlin invasion of Ukraine and how that impacted the state’s ability to accommodate asylum seekers.

“But arrivals from Ukraine and the increase in numbers started over two years ago now, and all we got is a new accommodation strategy that promises 14,000 beds by the end of 2028,” he said.

As of 13 August, 2,462 people seeking asylum were unaccommodated, according to official figures.

In a recent ruling, Mr Justice Barry O’Donnell said that asylum seekers had a well-established right to have their “human dignity respected and protected”.

“Including by being provided with an adequate standard of living which guarantees their subsistence and protects their physical and mental health,” he said.

The court is satisfied, Mr Justice O’Donnell said, that the current response to the needs of asylum seekers is so inadequate that it violates their human rights.

The Department of Children and Equality has drawn up a new accommodation strategy that pledges to cut down its dependence on private properties.

Lannon, the CEO of Doras, points to the difficulties of navigating racist opposition to opening up centres even if they are state-owned, and how there doesn’t seem to be any proper plan for handling that.

“The protests are happening around the country now and are becoming violent in nature in places like Coolock,” he said.

People are also blocking the entrance of Thornton Hall, a state-owned site in north Dublin where the government plans to house asylum seekers.

On a recent morning, there were tricolours, tents, and shabby shacks pitched up outside the site.

Hope for me and my friends

Hamour, the man who lost his accommodation in Dundalk, says he still doesn’t have the right to work but craves the kind of morning routine some workers have.

So he gets up in the morning and strolls around the city, he said.

Last Wednesday evening, he sat in an Insomnia café, scrolling through his phone and glancing at the things that he had to leave behind, he says.

“I was thinking of my country, my car, my cats,” said Hamour, whose ID card issued by the Palestinian government says he worked as a CEO.

He was hoping to get a bed and the right to work and have a real morning routine, he said on Thursday, a day before he was offered a bed again.

He strolled towards where he’d pitched tents with the other men. “I’m very good with electricals,” he said.

But more than anything, he just wanted to know that all of his friends are going to be okay, he said.

[CORRECTION: This article was updated at 6.50pm on 23 August 2024 to take out that Rafat Hamour wasn’t wearing socks, as he was. Sorry for the error.]