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Kennedy George, aged 21
Kennedy George got his deportation letter on 20 January 2005. He reported to the Garda immigration bureau on Burgh Quay, and was told to come back a week later. When he returned, he was told to come back again later. He has been attending the immigration bureau regularly since January 2005, each time not knowing if he would be detained and deported.
Kennedy George is from Sierra Leone. He came to Ireland, alone, in August 2001, aged 16. In 2002 he had got his Leaving Cert but has not been able to study or work since then under the rules applying to asylum seekers.
He has no family that he knows of. "I lost everybody in 2000", he says, in attacks by the Revolutionary United Front rebel group.
Though the civil war in Sierra Leone has ended, it remains one of the poorest countries in the world, ranked last in the United Nations "human development" index, one place below Niger. The life expectancy there in 2002 was 34 years. The probability of not surviving to the age of 40 in Sierra Leone is 57.5 per cent. Kennedy is one of a group of asylum seekers known in the system as "aged out minors" - people who sought asylum in Ireland as minors and were placed in the care of the State, but who have since passed the age of 18 and, having been refused asylum, face deportation.
Now these young people have come together in a campaign to lobby for them to be granted asylum, or residency, en masse.
A cross-party group of TDs supported by the Fine Gael leadership is backing the campaign.
"They came here young, unaccompanied and at a vulnerable stage in their lives from difficult circumstances. They have done their education here," said Labour TD Eamon Gilmore. "The only future that's open to them is to be deported. They literally are just being flung back there and left out on the street. They have no families, no support networks. In many cases they've come here from countries that are at war, or from oppressive regimes.
"They've become part of Ireland but they can't work, can't do courses... The most pragmatic thing is to leave them here."
The campaign is being organised by the Dun Laoghaire Refugee Project, a support network of volunteers in south Dublin that came together to work with young asylum seekers in hostels and schools in the area. Mary King of the project said there were some 120 "aged out minors" in State-funded accommodation, and a further 100 to 150 living independently. 30 to 50 are now attending weekly campaign meetings in Dun Laoghaire.
Members of the campaign met with a cross-party group of TDs, which included Fiona O'Malley of coalition partners the Progressive Democrats, at the Dáil on October 5, 2005. The TDs sent a letter to Minister for Justice Michael McDowell advocating the campaign's case. A spokesman for the Minister said he would shortly be addressing the issue in the Dáil.
"There's a finite number; it's not a case of opening the floodgates," said Jim O'Keefe, calling for the group to be given "special consideration." Time delays in the asylum system, which meant that many had been waiting for a final decision for years and, in cases like Kennedy George's, had faced the stress of repeated visits to the Garda and constant uncertainty over their futures, meant that "it becomes more and more ridiculous to even considering deporting them," said O'Keefe.
Eamon Gilmore said: "From the country's point of view, it is better to leave these people here. It doesn't expose him (Michael McDowell) to an 'opening of the floodgates'. It could be done on a one-off basis without creating enormous precedents and can be ring-fenced."
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