Has Simon Harris’s Mount Street clearance backfired?

On Wednesday, a multi-agency operation got to work, moving up to 290 migrants who had been sleeping in tents outside the International Protection Office (IPO) on Dublin’s Mount Street. Buses and taxis brought the men to centres in Citywest, Crooksling and Swords. The streets were cleaned, the tents removed and barriers erected.

But there was no room on the buses for 30 men, and as Irish Times reporter Jack White found, they either walked the streets all night or took the tents handed out by a charity and moved to another part of the city to sleep.

By Thursday, they were back at Mount Street, joined by up to 40 men who had been brought to Swords in north Dublin for the night but were returned to the city centre with no clear plans as to where they might go.

As White notes, numbers built throughout the day; on average the IPO receives more than 50 new applicants every day and Thursday was no different.

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The “plan” to clear Mount Street looked like it worked - for a day. White tells In the News about the excitement among the asylum seekers when they thought they were being brought to safe accommodation and of the confusion and chaos surrounding the move by Government to clear the “shantytown”. And Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy explains the challenges facing the Government.

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan and Declan Conlon.