Perhaps the most extraordinary sight at the Refugee Application Centre during the week is the one we haven't seen.

Where are the politicians lining up to be photographed beside angry and exhausted asylum-seekers being denied entry to the office?

Where are the charities, pressure groups, voluntary organisations, priests, nuns and others whom one would normally expect to see attaching themselves to this sort of high-profile situation?

Where are the shoals of letters to the editor (none in yesterday's Irish Times)? Where are the battalions of press statements clogging newsroom fax machines?

Imagine the furore there would be if a refugee woman was found dead of hypothermia on a piece of waste ground some morning this winter and you can get an impression of the sort of reaction that has not happened in the face of the intermittent collapse of the service in Mount Street.

The purpose of pointing this out is not to complain that journalists are being left without their usual supply of prefabricated outrage with which to fill column inches and broadcast seconds. It is to point out the degree of isolation experienced by refugees and other asylum-seekers caught up in this situation.

There is no such thing, it appears, as a blanket, a bus, anything, in which to shelter people queuing for long hours in cold and dispiriting conditions.

It is easy to blame the Eastern Health Board, the Department of Justice et al for the state of affairs we have seen this week - but their apparent failure to get to grips with the intermittent collapse of the service is, perhaps, a reflection of the failure of the whole social services establishment to take any sort of an interest in what is going on.

And that is reflected throughout the State. Apparently the advertisements which the Department of Justice placed in the national and local newspapers at the end of last month, looking for urgent accommodation for asylum-seekers, produced offers of 3,000 places.

But the Eastern Health Board region alone (Dublin, Kildare, Wicklow) has 2,600 asylum-seekers in emergency accommodation and another 6,500 in the private rented sector. Set against this, the 3,000 places which the entire rest of the State has managed to come up with is a piffling amount.

It reflects credit on those who have come up with the offers of places. But the notion that the average county outside the EHB can come up with not much more than 100 places is not credible.

It certainly supports the suspicions of some EHB officials in recent times that the rest of the State considers this to be Dublin's problem, and would be just as happy if it stayed that way.

Dublin is now coping with a situation in which it is becoming very difficult to find a place for either asylum-seekers or Irish homeless people to stay.

It is entirely outside the ability of the community welfare officers in Lower Mount Street to do anything about this problem.

Their action of this week may result in them getting better premises from which to operate but it will not produce extra places in which asylum-seekers can lie down for the night.

Faced with this serious problem, it would be reassuring to know that some official body was to take energetic, determined, effective action.

On an interim level, this might include contacting all the churches urgently to ask about empty buildings or even empty schoolrooms which could be used until we find a better way of dealing with the situation.

It could involve health boards looking at empty hospital wards and other buildings which could be pressed into service as part of an emergency response to a real emergency.

It would involve, in the medium term, looking at whether the State needs to build hostels and shelters for asylum-seekers and for homeless people. Asylum-seekers, it is worth noting, are not clogging up hostels and night shelters.

By and large, it is the Irish homeless who find shelter in these places. But there is too little even of that and the alternative is often a doorway on the street.

The homeless have suffered from the same apathy at higher decision-making levels that is evident in the situation of refugees and other asylum-seekers.

Certainly, some of those who work with the homeless are as pessimistic about their ability to accommodate them this winter as are those who work with refugees.

It seems clear that what is needed at this stage is a high-powered task force which would act urgently to address these problems.

There is already an interdepartmental committee in place to consider the crisis concerning asylum-seekers.

On Tuesday, as one result of its work, the Department of the Environment and Local Government was drafting (drafting, mind you) a letter to county managers asking them to assess the accommodation offered for asylum-seekers over the past two weeks.

The Department was unable to make clear how long the assessments by county managers would take.

Now, it is a very simple matter for a journalist to sit in the comfort of a newsroom and criticise officials who are trying to deal with a difficult problem.

But there is a lack of urgency surrounding the issue. This is not to say that the officials lack a sense of urgency. It is, rather, that they are working in a context in which a sense of urgency about addressing this problem is not evident.

We do not hear of TDs kicking up a racket in the Dail, perhaps getting themselves suspended for a couple of hours, over this issue.

Bishops have failed to condemn the indifference of the system to what is happening. The poverty industry has had little or nothing to say - perhaps it is waiting for a grant to fund a research programme into the whole thing.

It would be good if we could all wake up before an asylum-seeker with nowhere else to sleep for the night is kicked to death in a doorway in our can-do, well-off, aren't-we-wonderful little European country.