A family from Somalia living in the west of Ireland have yet to have their application for leave to remain in Ireland answered, nine years after they first arrived here.

The family, a woman and two children, arrived in Ireland in June 1997 from Kenya. They had initially fled violence in Somalia for a refugee camp near the border in Kenya, and subsequently made their way to Ireland.

They were refused asylum, and subsequently applied for "leave to remain", an informal equivalent of asylum which can be granted, at the discretion of the Minister for Justice, to those who do not meet the legal criteria for refugees. The last communication they had from the Department of Justice was in 2000, when they applied for leave to remain.

The mother said she did not want to be identified in this article. Her two children, a boy aged 12 and a girl aged 11, are now in sixth class in the local primary school, having started in senior infants.

The mother is not allowed to work or take up full-time education, under Irish refugee law, and receives child benefit, one-parent benefit and rent allowance from the State.

(After arriving in Ireland, they were sent by the Health Board to a town in the west of Ireland (which they asked not to be identified). "At first it was very difficult," the mother said, but she has since made "a lot of good friends".)

The family has not received a deportation order, but have no guarantee of being allowed to stay in Ireland.

"I'm not free. I'm going day to day but I don't know what's tomorrow, what's going to happen," she said.

Somalis make up a growing proportion of the asylum seekers arriving in Ireland and many have been refused asylum by the Refugee Applications Commissioner and the Refugee Appeals Tribunal.

Somalia has been without a functioning government for 15 years, since a vicious civil war erupted in 1991. United Nations peacekeepers, led by the United States, landed in Somalia in 1993, in an attempt to secure humanitarian aid, but withdrew after suffering numerous casualties in 1995. There has been no functioning central administration since. Somalia is at present in the grip of one of the worst droughts to hit the Horn of Africa for decades (see article on East Africa in this issue).

Deporting aged-out minors

Meanwhile, the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, has refused to consider granting a small group of young asylum seekers leave to remain in Ireland, and has moved to deport some of the group.

The group's campaign, Please Let Us Stay (PLUS), was backed by the Fine Gael leadership and a cross-party group of politicians who made representations to the Minister for Justice. However, Michael McDowell has said he would not consider any group appeal for leave to remain.

Johnson Godwin, one of the spokespeople for the PLUS campaign, has since received a deportation order signed by the Minister, and has recently reported a number of times to the Garda immigration bureau. Refugee support groups are anticipating one or more group deportations in the coming days. In 2005, a deportation was carried out just before St Patrick's Day, and support groups say it is common for the Department of Justice to organise deportations close to holidays, so it is more difficult to organise protests.

Johnson Godwin arrived in Ireland as an unaccompanied minor in October 2003, and sought asylum, claiming to have been the victim of human rights abuses in the Warri State in Nigeria's Oil Delta region.

He attended O'Connell's School in Dublin, where he sat his Leaving Cert, and became involved in a large number of youth and voluntary activities. He completed a Leader Training and Child Proetection programme with Foroige, a youth development organisation, and won a Special Judges' Award at the 2005 World Refugee Day awards for his work with Foroige. He was accepted onto a management trainee programme at Tesco, but was unable to take it up as asylum seekers are prohibited by law from working.

Last summer, Johnson Godwin and a number of other young people who had sought, and been refused, asylum in Ireland formed a group to campaign for special permission to stay in Ireland. All the group arrived in Ireland as unaccompanied minors seeking asylum, and have since passed the age of 18, and are known in the system as "aged-out minors". They say that they have since settled here, with many having done their Leaving Cert and having good prospects of further study or employment, and asked that the Minister for Justice allow them remain in Ireland for a defined period of time in order to demonstrate their ability to contribute to Irish society and the economy.

Michael McDowell told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Equality and Law Reform last December he would not consider making a "blanket decision" on the group.

"People who come here as minors receive full education, full health board accommodation and so on. When they come of age, the issue of whether they should go home if they have been refused asylum is decided on a case-by-case basis," he said.

Also facing deportation in the group are asylum seekers from Sierra Leone and Angola. Kennedy George, from Sierra Leone, and Pedro Miguel, from Angola, each received deportation orders in early 2005, and have been reporting to the Garda immigration bureau on a regular basis – fortnightly or monthly – for over a year. Each time, they have faced the possibility of being detained and deported.

Angola and Sierra Leone have each emerged from vicious civil wars in recent years, during which there were massive abuses of human rights and widespread atrocities. Each country is significantly more stable now, but remains mired in poverty and characterised by widespread low-level violence.