More than 30 tents pitched along Grand Canal with extra barriers erected on popular walkway

Over a dozen new tents were pitched on a stretch of the Grand Canal on Saturday as kilometres of barriers continued to be erected along the popular South Dublin walkway.

More than 30 tents were pitched at the Baggot Street end of Wilton Terrace on Saturday morning. Some occupants sat in the shade of nearby trees making phone calls while others drank water from paper cups as morning joggers and parents with buggies paced the pavement under the warm May sunshine.

The barriers, which were first erected along the canal near Mount Street on Thursday morning following a multiagency operation to clear more than 100 homeless asylum seekers’ tents, now stretch from Warrington and Percy Place, along most of Wilton Terrace, and onwards along Charlemont place, ending at Harcourt Terrace. Most of the men moved on Thursday morning were transported to Crooksling in southwest Dublin and Dundrum.

It is understood workers erecting additional barriers by the Huband Bridge on Herbert Place on Saturday morning did not plan to move the more than 30 men currently camped near the McCartney Bridge on Baggot Street, saying their responsibility was to put up barriers, not move the men on.

Most of the tents pitched at Wilton Terrace were occupied by Afghan and Palestinian men, a small number of whom had previously spent time in Crooksling and have been in Dublin for several weeks. However, it is understood the majority had arrived in Ireland in recent days, since the Thursday cleanout further along the canal.

[ Accommodating asylum seekers: ‘Lurching from encampment crisis to encampment crisis is a gift to the far right’ ]

One Afghan man, who spoke with The Irish Times, said he left Crooksling because he was unhappy with the shower and toilet conditions and felt safer being in the city centre. However, others camping at the site were reluctant to speak because of an increase in racial abuse targeted at the men on Friday evening.

There are currently 1,715 asylum-seeking men awaiting an offer of accommodation, according to the latest International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) statistics.

An average of 87 asylum seekers arrived in Ireland per day during the first week of May, up from an average of 57 per day during the last week of April. The vast majority of arrivals so far this month have come from Nigeria with smaller numbers arriving from Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Zimbabwe.

Nearly 40 per cent of new arrivals were single men, while 27 per cent were children and nine per cent were women.

Olivia Headon, who previously worked with the International Organisation for Migration in countries like Yemen, Somalia and Ukraine, and is currently volunteering along the canal, said as long as the Government cannot offer accommodation to asylum seekers on arrival, men will continue to camp around the city centre.

They will also remain in groups because “they’ve just arrived in this country alone, they don’t feel safe and they want to be in a network”, she said.

“There’s an assumption in some parts of Government that these men have personal networks and resources here that they can rely on,” said Ms Headon. “Some people do but many people, particularly the Afghan men, don’t. A lot of the men on the streets are from Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria and have experienced real hardship. A lot of the Afghan men came here on boats, they’ve seen people die coming here. They’re very vulnerable.”

The erection of barriers along swathes of the Grand Canal is “sending a message that makes this look like it’s a much bigger and more dangerous problem than it actually is,” she said. “There were only around 100 tents at the canal before Thursday, now it’s just over 30, but we now have kilometres of the canal covered in barriers which is usually a recreational space in the summer. That just creates tension and also affects Irish people who are homeless and camp in these places.”

The Government needs to co-ordinate with pre-existing homeless outreach teams to create a register of all men who are sleeping rough while awaiting accommodation offers, said Ms Headon. “They need an outreach team to go out on the streets and along the canal, particularly on the weekends when people who stay in hostels during the week arrive, and do a full assessment on location of these rough sleepers. Then they can deal with those numbers. We don’t have a proper register of who these men are, we need that.”