Olivia Headon discreetly knocks on the door of each of the tents set up on the banks of the Grand Canal, the arm of water that runs through Dublin and connects the city with the River Shannon. Together with a group of volunteers, she has brought fifty insulating mats to prevent humidity from getting into the bones of the immigrants crowded along 100 meters. “Some had no idea they were going to end up in Ireland and others have fled the United Kingdom for fear of being deported to Rwanda,” explains Headon, who has worked for a decade for the communications department of the International Organization for of Migration (IOM) of the UN in conflict zones such as Ukraine or Somalia.
The country that sent the most immigrants to the rest of the world for almost a century is now facing a migration crisis that has caught it off guard, unable to provide an effective and humanitarian response to the flood of new arrivals, and embroiled in a diplomatic conflict. with its neighbor and rival, the United Kingdom.
“Ireland will not be the loophole through which the immigration problems of another country slip through,” protested Simon Harris, prime minister of the republic, earlier this month. His government accuses London of having allowed thousands of asylum seekers to enter the neighboring country from Northern Ireland, a British territory. Faced with the possibility of being deported to Rwanda starting in July, when British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has insisted that flights begin, many irregular migrants have decided to flee to the closest and most accessible EU territory.
Brexit brought with it the protocol that preserved an open border between the two Irelands, and those 500 porous kilometers have become an easy access route by road or rail.
Nearly 7,000 people have arrived on the island this year. At the current rate, the Government believes that they could reach 20,000 by the end of the year, and demands to be able to return the majority of them – 80%, it has calculated – to the British territory from which it claims they arrived.
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Since last year, Ireland, a country of five million inhabitants, has welcomed 75,000 Ukrainians and nearly 25,000 aspiring refugees from many other countries: Syria, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Jordan, Palestine and, mainly (up to a third of the new arrivals ), Nigeria.
“No one I know here wanted to end up in Ireland,” explains 33-year-old Moroccan Abdel. He has been in Dublin for more than seven months, with his Hungarian wife, Evelyn, 22. The two occupy one of the tents in the makeshift camp. Before, they toured half of Europe, after a judicial problem in Spain that he prefers not to detail. The couple ended up in the United Kingdom. And it was there that they began to hear more and more rumors that Rwanda could be their final destination. “I decided that we were coming here, although now I would love to warn many of my colleagues that Ireland is the wrong country,” he adds. “They are not prepared for this.”
For almost a year, tents – the easy-to-deploy, two-second set-up model that is so popular – piled up around the International Protection offices on Lower Mount Street, almost face to face with the Delegation of the EU in Dublin. The Irish Government itself gave away tents and sleeping bags, unable to accommodate the immigrants who were arriving. A Dantesque spectacle of overcrowding and lack of hygiene in the center of the city.
One morning at the end of April, dozens of police officers, along with tow trucks and buses, forcibly cleared the street. Hundreds of irregular migrants were taken to two makeshift camps on the outskirts of the city, with larger tents, showers, bathrooms, dining rooms and better facilities.
The street was filled with concrete blocks and metal fences, to prevent a new camp from emerging. But the new centers did not have enough space for everyone, and many of the newcomers did not want to be isolated, far from the city, unable to see opportunities for improvement.
They returned to the city. Up to 300 new shops were set up along the Grand Canal. And the police evicted them again. In vain. This Wednesday, there was another settlement with 50 stores. On Friday there were already 100. They don’t stop coming.
Of the 12 immigrants consulted for this report, only two have acknowledged that they fled the United Kingdom due to the threat of ending up in Rwanda. But everyone is afraid to tell the exact truth of their adventures. Four young men, between 21 and 25 years old, were trying to explain, in broken and incomplete English, the reason that brought them to Ireland. Two are Palestinians. The other two, Jordanians. “I left Gaza a month ago, and traveled through Egypt and Libya before crossing the rest of Europe aboard trucks,” explains the youngest. He claims that the adventure has cost him thousands of dollars.

“Not so many thousands, but quite a bit of money,” answers Mohammed, a 32-year-old Afghan. He guards his tent like a fortress. He doesn’t walk away from her. He says that he paid up to 1,400 euros to be able to enter one of the boats that the mafias use to cross the English Channel, from the French to the English coasts. “More than 60 people were on board. He was terrifying. I arrived in Ireland inside one of the trucks that he crosses on the ferries that connect the islands. I had to give up my iPhone in exchange,” he laments.
latent racism
Last November, the streets of Dublin erupted with unprecedented xenophobic violence. The stabbing of a girl and a teacher by a mentally ill man of foreign origin angered far-right groups who agitated the networks, set buses and police vehicles on fire and tried to attack some of the centers and hotels where the immigrants were staying.
The episodes of night harassment in the improvised camps have put fear into the bodies of the immigrants. Fear that is added to what they already brought from home.
“I escaped from Cameroon because I am gay, and my life was in danger there,” explains Challou Charriot, 46. I passed through Türkiye before reaching Ireland. I paid $4,500,” he says while tidying up the inside of his store. Her partner ended up in one of the new immigrant centers improvised by the Government. They have not been seen since the end of April.
A few meters from Charriot, a man checks and rechecks the documents he has filled out to apply for International Protection from the Government of Ireland. Olalekan Makinde, 45, sticks his head out of the window of his cubicle and cries inconsolably like a child as he recounts how he confronted a cult leader who raped his wife. The woman stayed in Nigeria. Makinde has ended up on the banks of a canal in Dublin, not knowing what will become of his life. He covers his face and babbles, trying to justify his trip.

The Irish Government is also stammering, faced with a crisis that it has not known how to manage. “This is how the extreme right is fed and a feeling of panic is created among citizens,” the writer Fintan O’Toole denounced in the pages of the Irish Times. “Expectations that are impossible to meet are raised (such as border control) that spread more and more alarm among the population as failure is confirmed. And a shamefully chaotic image emerges: young people camped in the middle of the city, not knowing where to go,” he points out.
Some citizens walk between the shops with indifference, or go running along the canal bank and dodge the immigrants. Others, like Maya or Hillary, bring sandwiches, pastries and fruit juices for the campers. Some volunteers collect the garbage that accumulates around the area every afternoon.
In the coming weeks, the Government hopes to be able to use the Thornton Hall grounds, north of Dublin, as a temporary camp, where it once planned to build a prison. Nearly 2,000 people roam the city today, having breakfast, lunch and dinner in soup kitchens like the one at Capuchin Center or the Mendicity Institution. And they try to resist in a legal limbo that protects them from the threat of being deported to Rwanda.
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