Over 550 community welfare officers are threatening to boycott the system for paying maintenance to asylum-seekers relocated in the provinces. They say it is discriminatory and effectively confines the recipients to the small provincial towns to which they have been consigned.
The officers have also accused the Government of using the system to discourage asylum-seekers from coming to Ireland.
Yesterday IMPACT and SIPTU issued a joint statement condemning Government policy on behalf of the officers. This has been broadly welcomed by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, the Irish Refugee Council and the Free Legal Advice Centres. It is understood that at least one asylum-seeker is mounting a legal challenge to the way in which supplementary welfare is administered under the dispersal system.
Over 800 asylum-seekers have so far been relocated to provincial towns. The cost of their accommodation and food is paid directly to the hostel, hotel or bed and breakfast concerned. The asylum-seekers then receive a supplementary welfare payment of £15 a week from the local community welfare officers. Normally officers have discretion in making payments to destitute people but this does not apply in the case of asylum-seekers.
The unions are seeking an urgent meeting with the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, which introduced the dispersal policy, to have it reviewed.
IMPACT national secretary Mr Kevin Callinan said community welfare officers were "angry and upset at being compelled to administer a policy which they see as being blatantly discriminatory. If there is no movement at Government level, we cannot guarantee that staff will continue to work such a policy.
"The £15 payment, or £2.14 a day, amounts to less than two bus fares. I challenge anybody to survive on that. This inhumane policy is aimed simply at discouraging asylum-seekers coming to Ireland, even though we have the resources to face up to our international responsibilities." He said that in some cases asylum-seekers were "virtually incarcerated and prevented from visiting their friends, let alone seeking appropriate accommodation".
SIPTU national equality officer, Ms Rosheen Callender, said SIPTU members "are committed to full equal treatment for all supplementary applicants, irrespective of their nationality and country of origin". She said the Government had not only failed to meet the needs of asylum-seekers but also failed to ensure local communities had the facilities and opportunities to meet and interact with their guests "and extend whatever hospitality they can to people who find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings". She said one of the worst situations was in Glengarriff, west Cork, where about 100 asylum-seekers were located in two hotels and had little contact with the outside world.
The director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Mr Donnacha O'Connell, expressed concern last night "at anything that incurred hardship for asylum-seekers, but if the basis for the industrial action is to oppose the discrimination that currently exists we would welcome it as a matter of principle".
The chairwoman of FLAC, Ms Siobhan Phelan, said her organisation was becoming increasingly concerned at evidence that asylum-seekers were being treated differently under the supplementary welfare allowance scheme. She said the system may be in breach of the Constitution.
The policy officer of the IRC, Mr Ned Lawton, described the dispersal system as "inhumane, discriminatory and economically unsound".