It is “objectively” not fair to say that the government has “failed” on asylum seeker accommodation, Taoiseach Simon Harris has said, adding that no communities in Ireland believe that.
Speaking in the Dáil today, Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik put it to the Taoiseach that his government’s immigration policy has “failed”.
“The clearest evidence of that failure is just around the corner with hundreds of people sleeping in tents and makeshift shelters in desperately unsanitary conditions on Mount Street,” she said, claiming that there are “more and more tents each day” and describing the situation as “inhumane and unsustainable”.
“The government has no accommodation strategy, even while big public buildings like Baggot Street Hospital sit scandalously idle nearby,” she added.
The Taoiseach responded that this description of the situation on Mount Street was “fair”, adding that Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman is “working very actively” on moving “all those vulnerable people living in tents” to better accommodation.
“Once we clear Mount Street and provide people with a safer setting and access to sanitation, we need to make sure that the laws of the land are applied and it is not allowed to happen again,” he said.
“Because we do not live in a country where makeshift shantytowns are allowed to just develop.”
The Taoiseach later went on to claim that it is “objectively” not fair to say that the government has failed on asylum seeker accommodation.
“I do not think it is objectively fair to say the government has failed on accommodation,” he said, adding: “I do not think there is a community across Ireland who believes that.”
He said that “the scale of challenge” the country has faced and “the amount we have done as a people to provide accommodation in very difficult circumstances” are factors which “need to be acknowledged.”
“There are no easy solutions when it comes to accommodation,” he said.
“All too often in our migration debates in Ireland, we start the migration discussion from an accommodation supply point of view. That is the wrong place to start.
“We need to start from a migration rules-based system and its efficiency in order that people who do not have a right to be here are asked to leave more quickly and that we can stand over the rules that are in place. I believe that is what the people are getting frustrated about right across this country.”
Last week Gript reported how the Mount Street asylum seeker tent city, which just the week prior was estimated to have around 100 tents, had expanded to around 210 tents, doubling in the space of a week.
In an interview with this publication, a Palestinian asylum seeker living in one of the tents alleged that he was struggling to sleep because other asylum seekers in adjacent tents were buying drugs in the middle of the night.
"Big trouble here": A Palestinian asylum seeker living in the IPO tent city on Mount Street has told Gript that he can't sleep at night because as many as "10 or 11" other asylum seekers living in the tents are buying drugs.
He asked to have his face blurred to avoid "trouble." pic.twitter.com/FFo3CtKXTP
— gript (@griptmedia) April 26, 2024