Church urged to take the lead on refugees

Government failures to settle refugees are not surprising, but a new scheme gives the Church the opportunity to step up and help, a leading priest has said.

“It’s not surprising the system they’ve had in place is failing because it lacked a vision underpinning it about what integration is,” Fr Alan Hilliard told The Irish Catholic, commenting on reports that the Government is considering suspending its settlement programme for refugees from the Middle East.

Although the Government undertook in 2015 to accept 4,000 asylum seekers currently housed in camps in Greece, Italy and Lebanon, only about 1,400 people have so far arrived in Ireland, with the State growing increasingly concerned about its capacity to accommodate refugees.

Although Irish bishops, priests and parishes have repeatedly in recent years offered to help, and have been unable to do so, this situation has changed in recent months, Fr Hilliard said.

“Up until recently there was only one means of settling asylum seekers and refugees, and that was through Government initiatives, but the Government has put up a new scheme whereby communities can sponsor asylum seekers and refugees,” he said.

Sponsorship

In September, he explained, the Government announced at the Annual Concordia Summit in New York that Ireland was adopting a community sponsorship programme for refugees. Community sponsorship is a model of refugee development pioneered in Canada in the late 1970s, enabling local communities to work together to help resettle refugees.

“I’m not surprised that the Government is sort of washing its hands of it saying they haven’t got capacity, but really the method they had in place for resettling asylum seekers and refugees leaves a lot to be desired – I think the community could do a lot more,” Fr Alan Hilliard said, adding that the community sponsorship programme “gives an opportunity, if people are serious about welcoming the stranger, to go in a different direction”.

Noting that other countries have successfully used communities to sponsor the resettlement of refugees, Fr Hilliard said: “The largest sponsor of resettlement of refugees in the United States is the American Catholic bishops’ conference, but we’ve never had that opportunity before this year. The question is now can community-based agencies like the Church respond to that?”