In 1986, the academic who was to become my supervisor at Oxford University, Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond, wrote a seminal book based on the first independent appraisal of an assistance program mounted in response to an emergency influx of refugees. The book was called “Imposing Aid”. The research that underpinned it mainly concerned the 1982 crisis involving Ugandans who spilled over the Sudan border, but it has serious ramifications for the current European, American, and, from where I’m looking, Irish crisis that is opening up divisions politically and socially.
Harrell-Bond’s research documents with statistics and case materials the impact of aid and of aid workers on refugees and their hosts. Many forced migrants in Africa are accommodated in refugee camps, and the aid, financial and other, that they receive, is funnelled through aid agencies, which are often self serving, cynical and dysfunctional. This has uncanny parallels in Ireland where speculators rent out their properties at astronomical cost paid for by the Irish government. Often these properties are hotels that have formed the hub of communities for events, and leisure programmes, and meanwhile the communities themselves bear the burden of infrastructural demands like having to compete for limited places in schools, medical facilities and other local infrastructure, while receiving nothing, or almost nothing, in…
