Video: Asylum seekers sent to two different sites after Mount Street's 'tent city' cleared
An operation has been undertaken in Dublin to move hundreds of asylum seekers who had been sleeping in a large encampment of tents in the city centre.
In recent months, migrants have been sleeping rough beside the city’s International Protection Office on Mount Street as the state struggles to source enough accommodation for people seeking asylum.
The operation to move the makeshift camp that began early on Wednesday morning comes amid increasing diplomatic tensions between Ireland and the UK after the Government expressed concern about an upsurge of asylum seekers entering the state via the land border from Northern Ireland.
The Government has said the asylum seekers "have now been safely moved to Citywest and to Crooksling tented accommodation" in Dublin.
"The Crooksling site has robust, weather-proof tents. It has toilets and showers; health services; indoor areas where food is provided; facilities to charge phones and personal devices; access to transport to and from Dublin City Centre; and 24-hour onsite security," a statement said.
"While in Crooksling accommodation, residents will receive the same supports as at other locations. This includes access to medical care via the HSE social inclusion outreach teams and medical card provision; IPAS customer services team clinics; onsite support from the provider’s staff; and psycho-social and integration support from NGO partners."
Tánaiste Micheál Martin said the operation in Mount Street is to ensure the “safe movement of people” who are seeking asylum.
He said the sites that people are being moved to have facilities like toilets, showers, health services and indoor areas and facilities to charge phones and personal devices.
Mr Martin said: “The Crooksling site has transport to and from Dublin city centre and onsite security.
“It’s very important that we do this properly and our objective is to make sure we continue to provide accommodation of this kind, and as well faster processing of those seeking asylum, particularly from designated safe countries. We discourage (the tents) very strongly.
“The state has, within its powers, the capacity to make sure we don’t have tents back up on Mount Street or other streets and our view in Government is very clear is that we can’t have tents in streets adjacent to neighbourhoods.
“It’s not good for those seeking asylum and not for residents in the area, and it can create a lot of tension.”
Earlier, a number of the asylum seekers had been seen packing their belongings.
Curious onlookers gathered to watch hundreds of tents being cleared from the Mount Street location. Lorries with giant shovels at either end of a Garda cordon worked systematically to clear the tents, before dumping them into a mass of fabric on the back of the trucks.
Those clearing the tents include men in white boiler suits, some in anti-viral masks, who walked by dragging tents behind them.
One tent was daubed with the words ‘EU racist asylum policy’. Soon enough it too was scooped up.
The operation had begun just after 7am while the migrants were clustered in the centre of the cordon next to buses which were being used to ferry them to new accommodation. By 10am only one bus seemed to remain on Mount Street, with the vast majority of the tented encampment cleared.
In place of the the tents, workmen assembled 8-foot-tall barriers along the pavement and at the roadside, in what appeared to be measures to prevent fresh tents from being pitched.
Asylum seekers, many of them families, roamed around the edges of the cordon seeking to access the International Protection Office, which had been due to open at 9am. Workers from the IPO alone were being allowed access to the office.
A young boy, no more than 14 in school uniform, passed by on an electric scooter shouting “get them out”.
Noel Wardick, chief executive with community group the Dublin City Community Co Op, said the “jury is out” as to how well the operation had been handled.
He said: “We don’t know where the men are going and we don’t know the condition of the site.”
Citing the movement of the tented population to Crooksling in southwest Dublin at St Patrick’s Day, an operation noteworthy for the poor initial state of the accommodation offered, Mr Wardick said that “let’s hope those lessons have been learned and that the men are in a vastly improved situation this evening”.
Speaking at the barriers, Labour leader Ivana Bacik said she welcomed the fact the Government had moved to act given the “inhumane and unsustainable conditions” at the site.
She said she thinks “the Government will have learned” from the previous experience at Crooksling and are “putting more appropriate services in place”. “This is long overdue, it should have happened before now,” she said.
Asked what will happen should the tents return, Ms Bacik said “if they do then it’s a failure of Government policy again”. “In a sense the Government have been asleep at the wheel in allowing this situation to build up to the point where there were 200 tents up and down the street,” she said.
On Tuesday, Taoiseach Simon Harris pledged the area would be cleared of tents with those living there to be given safer and cleaner accommodation.
He also said that once the tents were cleared the gathering of tents would not be allowed to re-form.
A Government statement this morning said: "A joint operation between the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth; the Department of Justice; An Garda Síochána; Dublin City Council; the Office of Public Works; and the HSE is underway on Mount Street, Dublin.
"The purpose of the operation is to ensure the safe movement of people seeking international protection from the tents on Mount Street to International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS)-designated accommodation.
"The IPAS-designated accommodation has toilets and showers; health services; indoor areas where food is provided; facilities to charge phones and personal devices; access to transport to and from Dublin City Centre; and 24 hour onsite security."
Aubrey McCarthy, the founder of Tiglin, the charity that helps people overcome addiction and homelessness, described the situation on Mount Street as “absolutely untenable”.
The charity’s outreach hub in Pearse Street had over 500 people seeking assistance on Tuesday night, he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland.
Mr McCarthy told of how he had observed the number of tents on Mount Street increase in recent days with tents doubling up on both sides of the street.
“At our outreach hub, which is the Lighthouse on Pearse Street last night, we had over 500 people queuing for hot food, clothing, sleeping bags, sanitary products. And also we are limited to three toilets. So there's a queue then of people trying to wash, trying to use the bathroom. And that certainly has doubled since the start of this year.”
The situation was not sustainable, he said, as there were only two portable toilets at the back of Grafton Court for the people sleeping in tents.
“I think the problem is, it is a perfect storm, our housing crisis, the numbers coming in. I think we've been sort of caught off-guard. And now what's happened with the UK as well.”
