Charity, Power, and the Government of Asylum Seekers in the Republic of Ireland

Abstract

This dissertation advances a Foucauldian ‘History of the Present’ to reframe the political function of charity in Ireland’s asylum system. Its central argument is that charity operates as a constitutive technology within the state’s asylum dispositif. The thesis conceptualises this as the ‘government of the compassionate’: a productive power formation that harnesses and conducts compassionate impulses through a charity-state nexus, thereby relaying neoliberal governmentality. The genealogical method is central to this analysis, tracing a durable rationality of conducting conduct through the strategic orchestration of civil society’s forces from the 1635 Statute of Charitable Uses to the 2009 Charities Act. This historical framework is empirically substantiated through vignettes of charitable organisations, which demonstrate how mechanisms of funding, audit, and ‘invited spaces’ co-opt critique. Completing the methodology’s critical work, the thesis speculatively recovers subjugated knowledges, specifically, the pre-modern Irish practice of oigidecht (guest-right). This recovery denaturalises the contemporary nexus and inspires the conceptual rerouting of compassion into community-accountable forms of solidarity. The primary contribution is thus a re-theorisation of charitable action as a historical technology of power, while opening a critical space to reclaim hospitality as an autonomous ethical practice.

Date of Award	9 Dec 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Morag A McDermont (Supervisor) & Katie L Bales (Supervisor)