www.crossingdialogues.com/journal.htm ORIGINAL ARTICLE Crossing Dialogues Association Disavowing asylum and the return of Ireland’s repressed Rඈඇංඍ Lൾඇඍංඇ Trinity College, Dublin (Ireland) Asylum seekers in Ireland have been incarcerated in Direct Provision centres since 1999. This article proposes that their existence is disavowed and hidden from public view, continuing the history of the disavowal by church, state and society in Ireland of people incarcerated in church institutions and psychiatric asylums. Disavowing and repressing phenomena such as taboo sexuality, mental health, migration, asylum and racialization has the habit of returning to haunt, in the manner of Freud’s return of the repressed. The article explores the plight of asylum seekers as the most recent link in the chain in Ireland’s practice of disavowing its sexual and other deviants and unwanted populations. I conclude by arguing that despite their racialization and incarceration, asylum seekers in Ireland are agents of active resistance. Keywords: asylum seekers, Ireland, disavowal, return of the repressed, Direct Provision, incarceration. DIAL PHIL MENT NEURO SCI 2018;11(2):60-67 60 In August 2018 a trans-gender woman called Sylvia was found dead in a Direct Provision centre for asylum seekers in the West of Ireland city of Galway. The Irish Department of Justice and Equality confirmed the death of the woman believed to have been living in the men’s ward of the centre despite identifying as a woman. Sylvia’s death shocked asylum seekers and their supporters in Ireland as it exposed not merely the abysmal lives imposed on asylum seekers in state care, but also the gendered aspect of hiding what Catholic Ireland has for years regarded as aberrations as has been the case in disavowing the fate of thousands of women pregnant out of wedlock incarcerated in church- run “Mother and Baby Homes” and “Magdalene Laundries.” Speaking of the gendered element of Sylvia’s death, Irish Senator Máire Devine, said to Gay Community News: “LGBT+ people [in Direct Provision] are terrified of coming out, they’re terrified of being who they are … if they do announce that they are LGBT+, the reaction is fairly vicious, there’s the bullying, the persecution, the sending to Coventry and probably a lot more than that. There’s fear of physical attacks and that has raised its ugly head at times” (Finnegan, 2018) The death of Sylvia is the sixty third death in the Direct Provision system, established in 1999 to house asylum seekers in Ireland, whose lives, and deaths, remain hidden from public view and thus disavowed by white Catholic Ireland. Ireland has been incarcerating asylum seekers in what is euphemistically known as “dispersal centres” or “direct provision centres” where asylum seekers receive bed, board and a paltry weekly “residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites” of 21.60 euro (raised in 2017 from €9.60 per child, and €19.10 per adult) (Bardon, 2017). Against this background, this article proposes that hiding the existence of asylum seekers in Ireland is the mirror image of the history of the disavowal by Irish state, society and media of people forcibly incarcerated in church institutions and in psychiatric asylums. After discussing the practice of denying what Irish people both knew but preferred not to know – namely the plight of people coercively incarcerated in church and state institutions – I move to argue that repressing and disavowing phenomena such as taboo sexuality, mental health, migration, asylum seeking, and racialization has the habit of returning to haunt, in the manner of Freud’s theorization of the return of the repressed. To illustrate my argument I explore the treatment of asylum seekers as the most recent link in the chain in Ireland’s practice of disavowing its sexual and other deviants and unwanted populations, as illustrated by the forcible incarceration of Irish women in church institutions for giving birth out of wedlock and of countless Irish children in religious institutions simply because they were poor or born out of wedlock. The stories of these women and these children, made public for the first time only in Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences