No Vacancy on Planet Fortress Ireland

Panel shows a sleek, heavily fortified building labeled “Irish Asylum System – MAX CAPACITY 400”. At the door, a harried official in a high-vis jacket holds a giant clipboard titled “Persistent System Pressure” and blocks a line of shivering asylum seekers carrying small suitcases tagged “Syria”, “Gaza”, “Congo”, “Afghanistan”. Above the door, a red neon sign flashes: “NO SPACE – TRY AGAIN NEXT YEAR”. Behind the same building, the back wall is ripped away to reveal a cavernous interior: rows of neatly made beds, whole sections roped off with signs saying “RESERVED FOR: Political Panic”, “Electoral Optics Only”, and “Media Outrage Quotas”. In the middle, a smug, well-fed bureaucrat in a suit labeled “Department of Justice” lounges at a huge desk built entirely out of ring-binder files reading “Capacity Review”, “Risk Assessment”, and “Public Sentiment Modeling”. He’s speaking into a phone connected to a group of tiny, anxious politicians projected on a big screen labeled “Dáil Party Leaders’ Zoom”: “Good news – we’ve successfully housed all available excuses. People, not so much.” In the far corner, a dusty, padlocked emergency shelter door is marked “Actual Contingency Housing – Do Not Open (May Upset Voters)”. Two asylum seekers peer through a crack in that door, seeing stacks of unused bunk beds and blankets. A small wall calendar on the bureaucrat’s desk shows last year’s asylum figure ‘18,651’ circled in red, and this year’s ‘13,000’ circled in green with a cheerful note: “Crisis Even Better With Fewer People!”. On the pavement outside, one of the turned-away asylum seekers looks up at a state billboard above the building that reads, in big friendly letters: “WELCOME TO IRELAND – A FAIR, COMPASSIONATE NATION”. Underneath, in tiny graffiti scrawl, someone has added: “*Offer not valid during persistent system pressure”.

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