Trying to move out of an asylum shelter, into the brutal private housing market, with holes in her safety net

Oksana Khvostikova pulls her laptop out of a bubble-wrap case and turns it on.

Her eyes are red and puffy. On her laptop, “housing discrimination” jumps up at the top of her Google searches.

On a Google Drive folder, she has documented a journey from Mariupol to Dublin and the contours of settling in an unfamiliar city.

There’s a video of her then-12-year-old son Viktor cheerfully throwing himself on a double-bed in Red Cow Moran Hotel when they first arrived in Ireland. A photo of Viktor eating and studying on a bunk bed in their current emergency shelter.

The letters in the folder chronicle their fight to be recognised as homeless by South Dublin County Council. “I wrote 31 letters,” said Khvostikova.

Unlike some Ukrainian refugees who have temporary protection in Ireland, Khvostikova has applied for asylum and has been granted refugee status under Irish law. That means she has the right to live and work here for as long as she wants.

In December 2022, soon after Khvostikova got her status, the International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) – the office within the Department of Children and Equality in charge of housing asylum seekers and refugees – sent her a letter.

It says IPAS is keen to help her move out of her accommodation centre and into a more permanent setting. It assigns her a project worker to help with the process.

She can now access all the mainstream housing aid available to Irish and European people, it says. “You will no doubt appreciate that this accommodation is required for new protection applicants arriving in Ireland,” the letter says.

But it doesn’t give her a deadline to leave.

About three months after sending that letter, IPAS moved Khvostikova and her son to another emergency shelter on Dundrum Road. Its conditions are worse, she says. But IPAS still hasn’t explicitly asked her to leave.

The council granted Khvostikova access to the housing subsidy, homeless HAP in June 2023. But it doesn’t recognise her as homeless for its emergency homeless accommodation or its prioritised social housing.

Emails show that its homeless unit has said she needs a notice to quit with a deadline from IPAS to trigger a homeless assessment. “They want a special date,” said Khvostikova recently.

But IPAS doesn’t usually issue hard eviction notices, says Adam Boyle, a solicitor at Mercy Law Resource Centre, which provides free legal advocacy for people experiencing homelessness.

At least, that’s what they have noticed during work with clients in the same boat, he says. Instead, it shuttles former asylum seekers from one centre to another or into tented accommodation, sometimes transplanting them to another county.

That soft eviction, he says, means they can be left without various homelessness supports, as councils refuse to accept them as homeless.

It ignores the precarity of their housing situation with IPAS or the shattering experience of being settled in one place and then forced to start over in another overnight, he says.

“A person who has legal status does not have legal entitlement to remain at an IPAS accommodation,” said Boyle by phone on Friday.

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing said its role is to shape a national policy framework and to allocate funding so local councils can offer accommodation and aid to combat homelessness in their area.

“The Department cannot make comments on individual cases,” they said.

A spokesperson for the council also said it can’t comment on individual cases.

How much longer?

Khvostikova lives in the Mount St Mary asylum shelter on Dundrum Road now. It’s an IPAS emergency shelter.

She and her son live in a tiny room with a bunk bed, a sink and a small desk.

The room is decorated with flowers and pictures of Christian saints –  including one of St Nicholas, patron saint of travellers, prisoners and orphans.

By his bed, her son keeps a toy car and a Lego diorama of London’s Tower Bridge and the London Eye, the big ferris wheel.

A clothes rack hanging on the door to their room is overstuffed with warm coats and bags.

Khvostikova doesn’t know how much longer they can stay there. Not that living there is easy, she says.

Her son has allergies, and centre staff complain when she opens the window to air out the room, she says.

On her phone, she shows texts to the manager asking if she could open the window to the “maximum level” now that she’s sent medical proof of her son’s condition.

Boyle, the solicitor, says when people who’ve come to Ireland seeking asylum successfully get their status these days, their housing situation becomes profoundly precarious.

They can eventually receive an offer of transfer to another county and be pulled away from support networks and jobs. “These transfers are often to the other side of the country,” said Boyle.

One of Mercy Law’s clients, who has little English, was offered a place much further away from where he had family ties.

“He had a brother, like a minor brother, and so he didn’t take that offer,” says Boyle.

He became homeless, sleeping in his car for several months, he says, because the local authority had said he was not their responsibility but IPAS’s.

“Even though, obviously, he is not IPAS’s responsibility,” said Boyle.

Ex-asylum seekers outside of Dublin can also face an uphill battle to access homelessness supports.

In November 2023, a former asylum seeker in Cork with a transfer offer to County Mayo recorded her conversation with a city council worker who turned down her request for emergency accommodation.

“We are not in a position to offer emergency accommodation to anyone who’s coming from direct provision who has been offered alternative accommodation, no matter how unsuitable [….],” the council worker can be heard saying.

Unseen

On 7 February 2023, the Department of Housing issued a notice to local authorities advising them about the kind of housing aid, including rental subsidies, that can be offered to people leaving direct provision.

That greenlit granting homeless HAP to former asylum seekers, said Boyle, the solicitor with Mercy Law. That homeless rent subsidy is higher than regular HAP.

Khvostikova was granted homeless HAP in June 2023, but South Dublin County Council refused to put her on the priority list for social housing.

She appealed that decision, but on 14 February, a staffer closed the case, saying she already had homeless HAP and was on the regular social housing list.

The appeal decision letter says Khvostikova can seek out emergency accommodation from the council’s homeless unit if she doesn’t want or can’t stay at her current shelter.

But when she did turn to the homeless unit, they refused to carry out a homeless assessment.

“Unfortunately, SDCC are not in a position to carry out a homeless assessment for you as long as you have an active IPAS booking,” says an email dated 13 March from a council worker.

It asks her to let them know if she has a deadline to leave from IPAS.

The Housing Act defines a person as homeless if they don’t have anywhere to live or live in a shelter, and, in the opinion of the authority, don’t have the income to source housing.

Boyle, the solicitor, says refusing to carry out a homeless assessment isn’t really lawful. One could argue that in the law it isn’t within the discretion of a local authority, they have to do it, he says.

Although they can carry it out and refuse to offer support, said Boyle. s.

Transferred and transferred

In January 2024, Minister for Children and Equality Roderic O’Gorman, a Green Party TD, told the Dáil that IPAS started making these transfers in September 2022.

Singles and couples who had held status for more than 18 months were getting these transfers, he said.

As of December 2023, nearly 6,040 people with status still lived in IPAS shelters, said O’Gorman.

Boyle, the solicitor, says that when people get their status now, they’re getting transferred more quickly — it used to be about 12 months later, but now it’s more like six.

He says local authorities should recognise that once someone is granted status, IPAS doesn’t owe them a place to stay and accept the reality of that. “It’s all at the discretion of the minister,” he said.

He says that if anyone facing eviction was asked to present a legal notice to quit for an RTB-registered tenancy to access homeless support, many would unjustly fall short.

“The most at-risk people, people who are living on the margins, are living in unregistered tenancies, in licensee situations,” he said.

“Anyone who would look at that would say that’s a silly approach,” Boyle said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Children and Equality said it’s not in a position to comment on individual cases.

But that IPAS has a dedicated transition team working in tandem with the Department of Housing and two charities to support former asylum-seekers’ move out of its shelters, they said.

O’Gorman had told the Dáil in January that IPAS withdraws offers of accommodation if someone is found to be in breach of house rules.

Khvostikova said she doesn’t want to misbehave just to get a notice to quit to access homeless supports. “I love law and order,” she said.

Contours of loss

Khvostikova says she keeps searching for and applying for rental homes, but they still seem far out of her reach.

She says she had a job as a cleaner in a sauna and massage place back in 2022. “They took me with my poor English, and I hurried to work,” she says.

But she was forced to quit.

Friends at Red Cow Moran Hotel were keeping an eye on her kid, but the manager found out he was alone and reported her to Tusla, she says.

“I rushed to a lawyer, wrote 12 letters to different Tusla officers that my son was safe,” she says.

Other parents raising kids in asylum shelters have reported experiencing similar things.

Right now, Khvostikova says she’s looking to do something remotely. But most of those jobs want someone with good English.

She’s taken English courses. Of course, she says. “The teacher said to learn, you need a clear mind.”

And, she’s too stressed to focus, she says. Back in Mariupol, she was an accountant with an office job and a remote one, says Khvostikova, smiling.

She pulls up photos of her old office and colleagues on her phone but unravels as soon as she looks at them. “I loved my colleagues,” she said.

One photo shows her in the office, sitting at a desk behind a giant laptop. She’s smiling and part of her long black hair is resting on her right shoulder.

Khvostikova gazes at the picture and sobs.

She wanted something permanent here, she says, because of Russophilic separatists’ fighting with nationalists since 2014 and the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea.

She and her son had left once before. “When times became calmer, we returned to Mariupol,” she said.

They thought that was the last time they had to leave, she says. They love Mariupol.

Mariupol, one of Ukraine’s largest cities, is largely Russian-speaking, and ravaged by the war. It fell under Kremlin rule back in May 2022, after months of bombing, which undid the city and killed thousands of its ordinary residents.

In February 2024, Meduza, an independent Russian outlet, reported on a YouTube video that showed Russian realtors in Mariupol weighing up the potential of its abandoned and shattered homes and pitching them for sale.

In search of normalcy

Khvostikova says she didn’t choose Ireland because she had heard of what was, at the time, the higher weekly allowance for Ukrainian refugees.

She had asked the Department of Social Protection to pay her €38.80 a week like other asylum seekers, and her request was granted in June 2022, she says.

Instead, her choice was based on Ireland’s history of neutrality and its anti-colonial spirit, says Khvostikova. “I know Ireland is peaceful.”

She and her son have tried so hard to adjust to life here and find fragments of normalcy again, says Khvostikova.

She volunteers at her son’s school and helps with art classes, as she did back in Mariupol, she says.

Her son is real geeky, great at math, she says, piling up documents on the table that showcase his achievements – among them, a certificate of full attendance, and one for completing a math and engineering summer course offered by the Centre for Talented Youth Ireland.

She’s studying to take the accountancy exam herself, she said.

She runs with Sanctuary Runners sometimes, trying to mingle and find friends.

But without a stable home, it all feels hollow and meaningless, she says.

She worries that they’re going to end up on the streets, says Khvostikova. “My dream is to have a normal life,” she said, crying.