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Ireland dismantled a sprawling tent city of hundreds of asylum seekers in central Dublin on Wednesday amid an escalating dispute with the UK over migration.
The makeshift encampment in the city’s elegant Georgian centre had come to symbolise the country’s struggles with its migration policy after it began offering homes only to asylum seeker families — not single individuals — amid a housing shortage.
Irish ministers this week approved plans to fix what they called “loopholes” in current legislation to allow asylum seekers arriving via Northern Ireland to be returned to the UK under an existing pact, something London has resisted.
Mohammed Saad Eissa, a 24-year-old Egyptian asylum seeker, said he was woken by police at 5am on the Dublin street where he had been camping out since arriving from Belfast two days earlier. “They said they were going to take us away,” he said.
Some of the all-male asylum-seekers who had camped there were put on buses. Activists said they believed they were being taken to a government-run site about 20km away, with tents, toilets and other facilities.
Saad Eissa spoke to the Financial Times from a taxi headed, he thought, for a hotel used to shelter asylum seekers. “I wanted to go. There were no toilets, no showers,” he said. “It’ll be good if it is what they say.”
The dawn operation to clear what Taoiseach Simon Harris has dubbed “makeshift shantytowns”, close to government buildings in central Dublin, came amid escalating UK-Irish tensions over rising numbers of asylum seekers entering via Northern Ireland.
Ireland says more than 80 per cent of asylum seekers are crossing the Irish border that Dublin fought hard to keep invisible and check-free after Brexit. It has provided no data, saying that the figure was based on officials’ expert assessment.
The government insists a deal with London from 2020 will allow it to return such people to the UK, and it expects London to honour the agreement.
But Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he was “not interested” in taking asylum seekers back from the EU via Ireland because France had refused to accept returns from the UK.
The sight of pavements around Ireland’s International Protection Office lined with tents for several months has embarrassed the government in a nation that suffered mass emigration in the past but has been transformed by immigration. One in five legal residents today was born abroad.
The camp has expanded in recent weeks, lining a main road and surrounding alleys. Ireland has told asylum seekers for months that it can only accommodate families. Single men — who numbered 1,839 as of Tuesday — have had to sleep rough. Most asylum seekers are from Nigeria.
Ireland’s net migration has more than tripled since 2021 and hit 77,600 in the year to April 2023 — the second-highest level since 1951 and the most since 2007 — as governments around Europe wrestle with the politics of handling migrant flows from poorer countries.
At the site of the encampment, streets were blocked off as diggers moved in to clear empty tents, guided by police, officials and workers wearing white coveralls.
Men who had vacated tents gathered their rucksacks and put belongings in garbage bags. Street cleaners swept up detritus including plastic bags, food wrappers and paper in an operation that lasted three hours. The government gave no details of where the men were being relocated.
Some of those crossing the Irish border were worried about Sunak’s plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda under controversial new legislation.
“I have come from Africa,” said Mohammed, who said he had migrated after a violent property dispute that left his brother in hospital. “I want to go to Europe.”
Kevin Byrne, chair of the South Georgian Core Residents’ Association, said the situation with the tent city had become “increasingly intolerable”. Hundreds of residents were affected and one business had seen trade drop so dramatically that it was at risk of going out of business unless the tents were removed, he said.
He applauded Harris for “taking control”, adding: “You can’t just drop lots of people on the street and walk away — that’s not the answer.”
“Good riddance,” said local resident Stan O’Brien, 66, adding that the tent city made people feel unsafe. “But they will come back.”
The government has cleared the area before, most recently just before the St Patrick’s Day holiday in March, only for tents to reappear.
Pir Sami Kupiszewski, 50, a Turkish political activist who has been in Ireland for three years, said he was not moving and now expected to be arrested.
“One man was texting me today in tears [after being removed from his tent],” said Róisín McAleer, an activist with Social Rights Ireland, a group that hands out tents and provides other help. The man had been relocated once before but had walked back because the facilities at the location he was taken to were poor.
“He doesn’t want to be there. They’re cut off from all social supports,” she said.
Harris on Tuesday vowed to “make sure that the laws of the land are applied” and said the return of tents “is not allowed to happen again”.
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