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The Institute for Global Health and Development

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/7193

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    “KILLING HOPE” REFUGEE MEN’S STRUGGLE TO INTEGRATE AND EXPERIENCE A SENSE OF BELONGING IN IRELAND
    (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, 2024-05-08) Blaney, Michael James
    The aim of this study was to investigate the role that work plays in the integration of men who had come through the Direct Provision (DP) system in the Republic of Ireland. Five focus groups and ten one-to-one interviews were conducted over a five-month period in 2018 in Ireland. The Indicators of Integration Framework (IoI) was used to analyse the data. The men came as outsiders but carried hope of beginning a new life. While they were in DP their outsider status remained. During the time of the fieldwork in 2018, the bulk of the cohort remained outsiders inhabiting the margins of Irish society. DP had a lasting and detrimental effect on the men. This is evidenced by the constant referral back to DP throughout the interview sessions. Even when the conversation was steered towards work and the future, the men consistently returned to speaking about DP. It left the men with a sense of shame, regret and continuing frustration. They felt the DP system had tainted them and they considered that it impaired their ability to find full-time work and thereby settle and integrate into the community. Even after receiving the right to live and work in Ireland, they perceived they were discriminated against and therefore remained outsiders. Because they were unable to find steady work, they constantly struggled to provide for themselves and their family. The lack of work undermined their self-reliance and sense of empowerment that doing manly work would have provided for their sense of masculinity. Integration is a two-way process, and it has been shown that the refugees are keen to integrate; however, the men received little assistance as they attempted to transition to lives outside DP and to integrate into Irish society. Work is important to the men’s masculinity but in isolation from other domains of the IoI, work offers no more or no less chance to facilitate integration.