Asylum seekers moved for ‘sanitary and safety reasons’, says Donohoe
Asylum seekers living in tents on Mount Street in Dublin were moved outside the city to provide them with a “safe space” to stay, Paschal Donohoe has said.
On Saturday, asylum seekers who were living outside the International Protection Office were bussed to Crooksling in Co Dublin, 20km outside the city centre, where they were provided with new tented accommodation.
While gone, the tents were removed from Mount Street, with groups accusing the Government of moving the asylum seekers out of sight ahead of the annual St Patrick’s Day parade.
The Public Expenditure Minister said that the asylum seekers living on Mount Street were moved due to a need to find “alternative and secure accommodation for them”.
“The Government, and I believe the country at large, would far rather have the people in a bed, with sanitation, with security, with shelter available to them, than sleeping on a street or in a laneway,” Mr Donohoe said.
Mr Donohoe said that the recent incident shows that the Government now must move towards providing emergency accommodation for asylum seekers at a bigger scale than in previous years.
“One of the things that we will need to engage with our country on, which this recent incident has demonstrated, is that we will need to provide emergency accommodation in locations and at scale in ways that will be different to how we’ve done it in the past.
“We are going to be facing a choice regarding, do we think it is acceptable that somebody is in a tent in our city centre, where they could be vulnerable, they don’t have access to security, they don’t have access to facilities or would we prefer to have them in a location, in which shelter, sanitation and security is provided?”
Government sources have confirmed that any asylum seekers who are moved to the Crooksling site will not lose out on offers of permanent accommodation.
It had been feared that last Saturday’s move would see the men lose their positions the queue for non-tented state accommodation, but a senior source confirmed that this was not the case and the men would still be offered accommodation as it became available.
However, that pipeline is said to be “limited” at the moment, with no new major accommodation sites expected to come on stream this week.
