Irish Examiner view: An avoidable Irish Windrush

The National Windrush Monument at Waterloo Station. The statue was designed by the Jamaican artist and sculptor Basil Watson.

Anyone familiar with the Windrush scandal, which began in 2018 and concerned people mainly of Caribbean origin who were wrongly detained in Britain, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in at least 83 cases, wrongly deported from Britain, will get a chill when they consider the current immigration situation in Ireland.

In the case of the Windrush generation (so named after the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought the first wave of migrants to Britain from the West Indies in 1948), many had been born British subjects and had arrived in the UK before 1973, yet were detained, deported, lost jobs or homes, had passports confiscated, and were denied medical care and other benefits to which they were entitled.