It’s obvious why the sun shines so rarely in Ireland. It’s because the beauty of this place under a blazing blue sky would drive you to distraction. You’d scarcely remember to do anything productive, or even to moan about your shrinking pay packet or job prospects — tasks essential to the maintenance of civilisation, Irish-style.

Take an azure Irish sky and a verdant Irish landscape, temperatures that are warm but never truly hot, then throw in the Africa Day travelling roadshow that has done the rounds of the island this month, and our country begins to seem like paradise — unless you’re highly resistant to polyrhythmic drumming.

When it was Dublin’s turn to host Africa Day last weekend in the Iveagh Gardens, countless thousands of white (and increasingly pink) folks mingled among the traditional crafts and curries, the West African rappers and South African dancers, and enjoyed the chance to feel both multiculturally good and multisensually well. Perhaps, as they queued to fork out €6 for Ethiopian-style chicken and rice, they noticed the queue was a bit short of, well, Ethiopians. And that, indeed, there were surprisingly few Africans at the event.

Still it offered a colourful vision of 21st-century Ireland, so different from the murky portrait of the 20th century with its systematic abuse of the vulnerable that had just been delivered in the Ryan report. Nice vision. Shame about the reality.

While we rehearse the sins of the past, and our media and political class stage bewildering shouting matches about who is going to pay for them, we continue to tolerate a system that systematically abuses thousands of vulnerable people who are at the mercy of the state.

Thousands of Africans and other immigrants in Ireland are asylum-seekers in the hands of a “direct provision” system that denies them the most basic dignity, that dehumanises and institutionalises them, that corrals them, gives them food and shelter, deprives them of the opportunity to work and throws them a pittance as “allowance” — €19.10 per week, unchanged from the IR£15 of pre-euro days. That sum wouldn’t buy you much chicken and rice if you were looking for the occasional culturally appropriate treat outside of your hostel.

The reason for this miserable system is clear: it’s a repellent. Look at how it is presented on the website of the state’s laughably named Reception and Integration Agency in eight languages against a grim, grey background. The system of direct provision is Ireland’s way of shouting, “You really don’t want to come here!”

The morality of mistreating thousands of people, many of them children, so that thousands more get the message that they are not wanted here scarcely needs to be discussed. President Mary McAleese put her finger on it last week. The abuses enumerated in the Ryan report are not unique to Ireland, or to the past. Such stories arise “wherever there are two or more people gathered . . . and they are in a hierarchy, with deference, with powers of authority over people whom they regard as inferiors, who are very vulnerable”.

The tales that come echoing out of the black hole that is the direct-provision system include testaments to the remarkable resilience and patience of people who find themselves at the wrong end of a hierarchy that is racist in practice if not intent. Inevitably they include stories of sexual exploitation, mistreated children, desperate violence borne of years living in barracks, dependence on antidepressant drugs, of people with no rights except to eat and sleep, often badly. To work and to be educated are among the human rights that asylum-seeking adults are denied.

With hostels scattered across the state under a “dispersal” scheme — the forced removal of people from population centres where they might find compatriots is another aspect of the “repellent” — this routine abuse is at least as visible as anything in the old industrial schools.

In the scheme of things in Bailout Ireland, the system doesn’t cost the state much — less than €90m last year. Most of this is paid to private-accommodation providers. A centre such as Mosney in Co Meath — relatively well-regarded by asylum-seekers — can hold more than 800 residents, and it made €600,000 profit in 2006 on a turnover of nearly €8.7m, Metro Eireann reported recently. There are claims from some asylum-seekers that some centres cut corners to maximise profits — well, they are private enterprises with no particular welfare ethos to govern them.

This partnership of convenience between the state and a slice of the “hospitality sector” gives rise to an evil of bureaucratic banality. You don’t need Afro-beat tunes or Ethiopian curry to appreciate the rich potential that immigrants represent. Last week the son of an African nominated the daughter of two Latin-Americans to the United States Supreme Court. America has somehow left room for even the poorest immigrants to manoeuvre. In Ireland today, they are forcibly left to rot.

Harry Browne is a lecturer in journalism at Dublin Institute of Technology

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