‘This is cleansing’: Dublin sends in police and buses to dismantle tent city

The convoy arrived just after sunrise: a stream of police vehicles, council trucks, mounted cranes and coaches, ready to dismantle a tent city of migrants and refugees in the heart of Dublin that had become too big, too visible, too political.

They fenced off streets and herded shocked, sleepy men from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and other countries on to buses and began to extirpate about 200 tents, gradually extinguishing all traces of the camp, but no amount of sweeping and hosing could remove the whiff of elections and diplomacy gone wrong.

Everyone agreed the shantytown around the government’s International Protection Office (IPO) at Lower Mount Street was an abomination – unhygienic, unsafe, unfair, a stain on Ireland ’s conscience – but the manner and timing of its removal reeked of politics, both Irish and British.

And now, under a bright May Day sun, came a dramatic swoop on the most visible evidence of Ireland’s migration crisis, an improvised camp that had sprung up 14 months earlier.

The men were ferried to a refugee shelter at Citywest and tented accommodation at Crooksling, a campsite 12 miles south-west of Dublin, where they were promised showers, meals and medical care.

Authorities had tolerated the makeshift camp for more than a year, citing a housing crisis and influxes from Ukraine and elsewhere that filled shelters, hotels, guesthouses and other accommodation.