A new total of 107 homeless asylum seeker tents are now lining the bank of the Grand Canal in Dublin.
Last Thursday, the figure was only 76, representing an increase of 31 tents in just four days.
“I didn’t say that wouldn’t happen again”: The number of migrant tents on the bank of Dublin’s Grand Canal has risen again to 76 – and Taoiseach Simon Harris says he never denied that the illegal shantytown could re-appear after it was cleared.https://t.co/MhKAPyAPFs
— gript (@griptmedia) May 16, 2024
Speaking to reporters in Dublin about the matter today, Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman said that his Department was moving to try and provide better State accommodation for those asylum seekers who were currently sleeping rough.
“In terms of providing accommodation for those who are currently unaccommodated, my Department has been working hard over the last week, and we will have additional capacity available across this week,” he said.
“We will be working hard with other government agencies to ensure we can provide offers to those currently sleeping rough on the Grand Canal.”
The Minister was also asked about statements made last week by Fianna Fáil Finance Minister Michael McGrath, who was reported to have said in a party meeting last week that Ireland could see between 26,000 and 30,000 asylum applications this year alone.
Alarm is reported to have been expressed at the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party tonight, during a lengthy discussion on migration, after TDs and Senators were warned that there could be between 26,000 to 30,000 asylum applications this yearhttps://t.co/CVz1c7fFvc
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) May 15, 2024
O’Gorman said that the 30,000 figure was unlikely, but that his own Department was still projecting a very high figure of 22,000.
He said that McGrath’s projections were based on “one particularly high week”, but that “those numbers haven’t been replicated subsequently.”
“When you look across the first four and a half months of this year, we estimate there will be around 22,000 people seeking international protection this year,” he said.
“That’s a significant jump on the 13,000 who sought accommodation last year.”
Integration Minister Roderic O'Gorman says his Department is projecting around 22,000 asylum seekers arriving in Ireland this year – a dramatic increase on the 13,000 that arrived last year. pic.twitter.com/FrVtBuPZNw
— gript (@griptmedia) May 20, 2024
However, he added: “…our comprehensive accommodation strategy is designed with those sorts of numbers in mind.”
Notably, the Department’s new asylum seeker accommodation strategy published at the end of March says it aims to “scale up” the country’s capacity to be able to accommodate “up to 35,000” asylum seekers “by the end of 2028.”
However, it says that this is “assuming that an average of 13,000-16,000 persons arrive between 2024 and 2028.”
That means that if 22,000 asylum seekers were to arrive this year as the Department projects, that would be 6,000 asylum seekers higher than the upper end of the annual average the government was preparing to accommodate.
For scale, in the year before Covid, Ireland’s asylum seeker intake was just 4,781 in 2019.
O'Gorman confirms here that the Irish government are anticipating as many as 16,000 new asylum seekers coming here every year on average over the next 4 years.
For a sense of scale, in the years before Covid, Ireland's intake was as follows:
2019: 4,781
2018: 3,673
2017: 2,926 https://t.co/6PmwdroYwm— Ben Scallan 🇮🇪 (@Ben_Scallan) March 27, 2024