State has powers to halt another tent city in Dublin, says Micheál Martin

The State has powers to prevent a reconstruction of the tent city in Dublin, according to the Tánaiste — but Paschal Donohoe said he cannot rule out more tents on the site.

As the camp was being removed, Micheál Martin said that the Government will "discourage very strongly" the return of asylum seekers to the area around the International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) offices on Mount Street.

Asked how this would be achieved, Mr Martin said that there are powers to ensure there is no return to the scenes of the recent months, but added that a key method of achieving this was additional capacity.

“The Government is very clear, we cannot have tents on streets adjacent to neighbourhoods and so forth. It is not good for those seeking asylum, it is not good for residents in the area, and it creates a lot of tensions which are not acceptable.

“There is a determination on the Government side to use our capacity and powers to make sure it doesn’t occur into the future.” 

Mr Martin said that the facilities available to the men in Crooksling and Citywest were an improvement, but accepted they were "not perfect".

“The facilities [in Crooksling] are far better. [It is] completely unacceptable for people to be living in tents on Mount Street with no access to toilets or no access to proper showers or facilities.

"There's no comparison, in my view, between the situation of people being in tents on the streets and in an environment or facility like Crooksling that has those facilities.

“[It is] not ideal, but we have a very significant increase in the number of asylum seekers coming into the country, way above anything ever experienced before.” 

However, in Blanchardstown on Wednesday, Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe said that he could not guarantee that tents would not appear. He said that the fear within government was that the tent city would have grown to a point where it could not be managed.

"I am confident that the scale of tented presence that we have seen in recent weeks, that steps will be taken to avoid that happening again. I can't rule out that in any given night or on any given day, that people who are in difficult circumstances may erect a tent. But I am very confident that our State agencies will take all the steps that are needed to try to prevent something of this scale from occurring again."