We must act to save migrants from doom

AS an island nation, Ireland has suffered more than its share of drownings at sea, but the disasters occurring on an almost daily basis in the Mediterranean are on a different scale to anything ever witnessed in the EU. 

Yet to their shame the governments of Europe persist in maintaining a deafening silence, apart, that is, from the customary ulagóning and wringing of hands in the face of a series of catastrophic events in which thousands of migrants have drowned.

As people who live in fishing communities around the Irish coast know to their cost, every drowning leaves a void, but hardly an eyebrow is raised in the capitals of Europe even when hundreds of migrants drown in the sinking of a rickety ship, a scenario so commonplace that the Mediterranean is now seen as the world’s most hazardous sea route.