THE NEW ENCAMPMENT of tents set up by unaccommodated asylum seekers along the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal has doubled in size in just three days, from around 50 tents to just under 100.
Asylum seekers living in tents beside the canal on Saturday told The Journal that they had been sleeping rough on O’Connell Street since Friday when they were turned away from the at-capacity Citywest transit hub.
This morning, one man was sleeping in a sleeping bag near a canal bridge, without a tent.
A Palestinian man in his 20s said that they heard about the encampment at the canal from other asylum seekers, and decided to set up tents (provided by charity services) at the canal, believing it to be a safer place to live, amongst a larger group of people.
Last Wednesday a multi-agency operation saw asylum seekers who were camping in the Mount Street area, as the Department of Integration said “just under” 290 people were removed and relocated to alternative accommodation at Citywest and the Crooksling tented accommodation site.
The Department could not give a timeline for how long people will be accommodated at both sites.
Officials said that the details have been taken of people who had been sleeping in areas other than the Mount Street encampment, who turned up at Citywest but were not accommodated, and that they will be contacted when accommodation comes on stream.
Last Wednesday the Taoiseach Simon Harris said that agencies had done an “excellent” job in clearing migrants tents around the International Protection Office and accommodating people elsewhere.
He said that a situation cannot be allowed to develop where “tented villages” are formed in a “very ad hoc fashion”.
RTÉ reported at the weekend that the Chairperson of the South Georgian Core Residents Association Kevin Byrne said that people were “grateful” for the operation that cleared migrant tents in the Mount Street Area.
Byrne also told the broadcaster that the Taoiseach had given a “political commitment” that other “shanty towns” would not be allowed to form in the city, and that now that an encampment has been set up by Grand Canal, “We’re just seeing a return to the problem we’ve had before”.
It is thought that most of the asylum seekers living by Grand Canal are newly arrived in the country, or are from the cohort that were turned away from Citywest.
The Journal has spoken to two men who have been in Ireland for less than a week at the encampment, and several who were turned away from the transit hub.
The Department of Integration has been contacted for comment.
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