Government fighting the symptom but ignoring cause of ‘tent cities’

In times of crisis, people sometimes avoid things they don’t want to accept are real. This week heralded the nadir of our refugee accommodation crisis, and our denialism of it, as the State found itself once again dismantling and removing the so-called “tent cities” pitched by people who came here seeking asylum.

The authorities moved in, the people seeking international protection were moved out, everyone involved knowing full well that the tents would appear again the next day on some other Dublin street.

This is the clearest example yet of the State frantically fighting the symptom, while studiously ignoring the cause.

Politicians have tried to use language that conveys calm and control, but it is clear now from the fact that the State has found itself relying on tents to provide accommodation that our international protection system is in a deep state of crisis.

Last September, the public was alarmed to learn the State would use the Electric Picnic campsite in Co Laois to house Ukrainian refugees, including children.

At the time, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission said it was “extremely concerned at any ‘normalisation’ of the use of tents to house refugees and applicants for international protection”.

In the months since, the Overton window of what is considered a politically acceptable response to the refugee accommodation crisis has shifted dramatically. On May 1, there was a lot of attention and headlines given to the removal of tents outside the International Protection Office on Mount Street.

By the time a similar operation was carried out at Grand Canal this week, the phenomenon of publicly evicting asylum-seekers from tents seemed to be positively mundane.

Our expectations of our own ability to accommodate refugees have fallen so low that most analysis of the tent controversy has entirely failed to recognise that we do have a legal obligation to accommodate those who come here seeking international protection.

That one of the most basic, internationally agreed principles of asylum-seeking now seems like a lofty or utopian concept should trouble all of us.

There is a kind of bureaucratic madness in admitting to people that we can’t accommodate them, paying charities to give them tents to sleep in instead, and then spending more government resources evicting and destroying those same tents.

It is also highly morally questionable to create a situation where people seeking international protection start to be framed as highly visible nuisances on local communities.

Human beings are roaming our capital city with tents, chased from street to street by austere, government-imposed fencing. Yet, they are being described in non-personified terms as “tent cities” – like they were some kind of perennial weed that keeps springing up to spite us.

It was reported this week that people had pitched tents in East Wall and Ringsend after being shifted away from Grand Canal. Anti-migrant demonstrations do not and should not define entire communities, but it should be of concern that both East Wall and Ringsend have witnessed very strong and at times violent demonstrations against refugee accommodation.

It was also reported that some people living in tents had been told by locals that they were not welcome in the area. By leaving people with nothing to live in but tents, we are leaving them totally vulnerable to violence.

When asked reasonable questions about this and any other refugee accommodation crisis, government ministers will often throw their hands to heaven and cite unprecedented wars and mass international migration. Things that no third-party government could reasonably be held responsible for.

But for over a decade now, Europe has been experiencing a migration crisis. Other countries, including Germany and Belgium, have also had to rely on tented accommodation. That this hadn’t yet come to our door in such numbers was a matter of God-given geography, rather than successful policy.

For decades, there were warnings about relying on private providers of direct provision accommodation rather than state-owned and run centres. The State left it so long to try to resolve that issue that by the time it finally had a good and well-considered white paper on direct provision, the political climate had made it impossible to implement.

That white paper was written with the strong perspective that the human rights and appropriate living conditions of people seeking asylum should be a priority – something that all the main parties endorsed. We are in a darker political climate now.

The priority now seems not to be the rights of the people coming here, more the right place to put them.

We never had proper infrastructure in place for international protection applicants. Now that far more people are coming here, what was always a weak system has crumbled completely.

We don’t blame a trolley crisis on people who get sick in winter. We don’t blame the housing crisis on people needing to live where jobs are. We should not blame the tent-strewn streets of our capital on the people who have come here seeking international protection, many of whom are only here as the direct result of a severe refugee policy in the UK.

We cannot keep seeing these “tent cities” as the product of an external, international problem that has come to trouble Ireland. There are plenty of domestic issues that should also share the blame.

‘We never had the infrastructure. Now more people are coming here, a weak system is crumbling’