Asylum seekers with physical disabilities journey across the city to get their weekly allowance of €38.80 in person

Boakai Nyehn Jr says he remembers how his legs would quiver as he waited in line at the city’s General Post Office (GPO).

“I cannot be standing long on these legs,” says Nyehn, resting his hand on a crutch tucked beside him.

Nyehn has a physical disability. He relies on crutches to walk and to stand. Back when he had to make regular trips to the GPO, he was still in the asylum process, he says.

Despite living at Holiday Inn Express Hotel in Santry, he had been assigned the O’Connell Street post office as a pick-up point for the weekly €38.80 allowance for asylum seekers, he says.

“It was challenging,” says Nyehn.

Nyehn had emailed a social welfare office to ask if the money could be sent to his bank account instead, he says. But they wouldn’t, he says.

Lucky Khambule of the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI) says most asylum seekers with physical disabilities face similar problems.

The solution is to send the money straight to their bank accounts, says Khambule. “So that they do not have to go to the post office every week.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Social Protection said it usually pays the daily expense aid through post offices. But people can choose a pickup point as close as possible to where they’re living, they said.

And, “where a person has a specific requirement to be paid by Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), this can be facilitated”, said the spokesperson.

Those wanting to explore that should contact their local community welfare office, which can be reached through a national hotline at  0818-607080, the spokesperson said.

That is all news to Nyehn, he says. Nobody had asked him where it would suit him to pick it up, he says.

Mel Cousins, a social work and social policy researcher at Trinity College Dublin, says the department has to clearly communicate all vital information like this to asylum seekers.

“They could be told that, in the case of disability (or for other specific reasons), they can request a bank transfer,” he said.

Phoning a community welfare office to request that isn’t ideal because of language barriers, Cousins says. “The language issue needs to be addressed so that a phone number alone is probably not the best option.”

For longer

Unlike Ukrainian refugees or those who come with refugee statuses under particular humanitarian programmes, asylum seekers can’t legally work when they first arrive in Ireland.

They need to wait five months before applying for a work permit, and can only do so if they haven’t had an initial decision on their asylum claim within six months.

It can take a long time for work permit applications to be processed. Currently, more than four months, says a Department of Justice website.

That leaves people seeking asylum reliant on the weekly allowance from the Department of Social Protection. They have to scrape by on a little over €5 a day, week after week.

Nyehn says it was tricky and unstable. As soon as he was allowed, he began to hunt for a job.

But that was gruelling, he says. It took him a year to find a boss who’d have him as a worker.

Two employers straight up told him that he wouldn’t be a good fit because of his disability, he says. “Because the job required some physical work.”

He is good with admin though, he says, with a ton of experience back in his country of birth. “Some kind of computer job, I’ll be able to sit down, and I don’t need to do a lot of walking.”

That it was a struggle to find an employer left him reliant on the government payout for longer – and meant travelling from Santry and trembling in GPO lines, week after week for a little over a year.

“It creates a kind of difficulty, especially if you’re using a device for support,” said Nyehn.

A little help

Under the Equal Status Acts, disabled people need to get reasonable accommodation or special treatment if it’s impossible or too difficult for them to access things otherwise, says the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission.

“This would seem to cover how a payment is provided,” says Cousins, the social work and social policy researcher at TCD.

It’s not fair to reject a request like that unless it would create extra costs for the government, he says. “However, it is normally cheaper to provide bank transfer.”

Says Nyehn: “There should be a case for reasonable accommodation, recognising that this person already has trauma from their condition.”

After a year of searching, Nyehn finally found a job as a receptionist at a homeless hostel in the city centre. He sits at a desk, answers the phone, and checks people staying there in and out.

It isn’t near where he lives in Santry. “I have to come to work at eight o’clock, and to get myself started, I have to get up early, like five or six,” said Nyehn.

But despite the difficulties of a daily commute, he is grateful, he says, and he likes his boss. But “I’m still in search of something I can do from home”, he says.

A little later, he grabbed his crutch and rose, staggering towards the café’s door and back to work.