"The focus is being taken away from long-standing failures to implement affordable housing and access to childcare, education and hospital beds." - Nasc CEO, Fiona Hurley
For decades, human rights advocates have urged the Government to plan for the long-term accommodation needs of all communities in Ireland, including both local and asylum-seeking people. This was not prioritised by Irish governments over the years.
We have normalised entire families living in one room, and single people living in tents. Over 1,000 international protection applicants are living on our streets. The Government has recently suspended vulnerability assessments, which are required by law in order to identify people with additional needs.
In recent years, we have highlighted the strategic, manipulative tactics of anti-immigration activists. Online and in-person, Irish communities who have been disadvantaged by the cost of living crisis are being targeted with misinformation about asylum-seekers.
The focus is being taken away from long-standing failures to implement affordable housing and access to childcare, education and hospital beds. These are systemic issues that pre-date the recent increase in asylum seekers coming to Ireland.
In the last year in particular, many Irish people have been pulled away from viewing our new communities as people with the same integrity, complexity, hopes for safety, and inherent and community value as everyone else. The average person scrolling through their social media feeds may not recognise that what they are watching, reading and hearing is often part of an engineered campaign of misinformation and dehumanisation. Social media companies have recognised how their algorithms are contributing to this in a negative way. Meta’s own internal research reported that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools… Our recommendation systems grow the problem”. (1)
Due to a mixture of misinformation, aversion to what is different, as well as the fear and frustration that comes with the cost of living and accommodation crises, public perception has become more disconnected from reality, and the focus has been taken away from successive Government’s obligations to everyone who calls Ireland home.
We are urging the Irish Government to:
- Resume the vulnerability assessment for asylum seekers, which is required by law,
- Utilise any empty beds across state accommodation,
- Implement forthcoming regulation by Coimisiún na Meán, requiring algorithm recommender systems (based on profiling) to be switched off by default, until a person makes the decision to switch them on. (2)
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- "Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive", Wall St. Journal, 26 May 2020 (URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499). This internal research in 2016 was confirmed again in 2019.
- “82% of the Irish public wants Big Tech’s toxic algorithms switched off”, Irish Council for Civil Liberties, 22 January 2024 (URL: https://www.iccl.ie/news/82-of-the-irish-public-wants-big-techs-toxic-algorithms-switched-off/)