Trinity College Dublin, the Department of Education and the Government's Refugee Agency are to set up an English language and job-training centre for refugees.
The new centre's first phase is expected to bring together around 60 refugees in an educational institution in central Dublin this autumn. Only those who have been given the right to remain in the State can participate. They will attend specialised language courses, leading to "bridging" courses comprising language and job skills, which in turn will lead to mainstream FAS and CERT training courses. The intention is that eventually the TCD-run centre will co-ordinate the language training of all refugees, from primary and secondary schoolchildren to adults in the workplace and women and old people at home. The initiative is an expansion of the EU-funded Refugee Language and Training Project, which has trained 106 refugees in the past 18 months at the FAS centre in Baldoyle, Co Dublin. This was a pilot project run as a partnership between the Refugee Agency, FAS, TCD, the Bosnian Community Development Project and the Irish Refugee Council.
The project was developed in response to a research report by TCD's Centre for Language and Communication Studies, recommending a more co-ordinated approach to training refugees, geared to their particular needs.
The TCD research found that the standard English courses the refugees had been taking in commercial colleges had not prepared them for entry to the Irish labour market. Their education and careers had usually been greatly disrupted, and they found themselves having to be retrained through a foreign language. This required specialised teaching and pre-vocational learning methods, which were successfully developed by FAS and TCD at Baldoyle.
The project evaluation says: "Refugees with the right to remain are entitled to English language training and places on mainstream training courses. They are also entitled to find work in this country. However, it has proved extremely difficult for the majority of refugees to gain access either to mainstream training or employment.
"Despite their prior qualifications and experience, they have been excluded from one of the basic necessities of life - a job - by language and other barriers. By accessing training and employment, men and women are enabled to provide for their own families, and to end their dependence on social welfare."
The evaluation report notes that in 1991-97, over 1,500 refugees were given the rights of Irish citizens, in addition to 426 Vietnamese "programme" refugees admitted in 1979-90. Another EU-funded initiative, the Access Ireland project, will train a small number of refugees to work with health and social workers in the Dublin area, helping to make them more aware of refugee needs. They will also work on community development initiatives with refugee groups.
The co-ordinator, Ms Ann Moroney, said yesterday the refugee community was "bearing the burden of enabling Ireland to become a multi-cultural society . . . We should see this as an opportunity rather than a burden, which is the way it is too often presented in public debate."