. @CharlieFlanagan when you were on @PatKennyNT today a young woman was being moved with her 9-month-old baby from a decrepit emergency accomodation centre to one of your much-heralded Direct Provision centres. She had hopes of a better situation than the Hell she was escaping. https://twitter.com/colinlenihan/status/1247229796066754566
When she got there no-one was expecting her. An IPAS-organised bus brought her there. No-one in IPAS told the centre she was coming, or so the manager says. The bus was gone. She was with her baby in a town she didn’t know and nowhere to stay.
The centre improvised something for her - they got partitions and sectioned off a part of a common area where she can live until they get to the bottom of what went wrong in your department @DeptJusticeIRL IPAS. You can’t talk about individual cases of course I know, I know
But it’s not just an individual case. The same thing happened to another woman transferred from the same Hellhole a week ago with her child and baby to another of your much-heralded Direct Provision centres recently opened. After a five-hour journey no-one knew she was coming.
Can you imagine how that makes you feel? How insignificant! As if you don’t matter, a sub-species. Meanwhile, YOU were on @NewstalkFM extolling the virtues of Direct Provision and your own proud record. You were on in the bus to we-don’t-know-anything-about-you-and-your-baby
The shambles you have presided over in weeks of exposure of 7500+ people to #COVID19 in crowded DP & EA centres is a scandal which will follow you to the end of your days. You are a decent man, but unless you demand emergency aid to ppl in DP NOW you will go down as a disgrace
The government must establish an emergency programme to transfer ppl by choice from shared living space accomodation to own-door independent living spaces, of which there are many all over the country as tourism has sunk out of sight.
It needs political will and the urgency the crisis demands. @RBoydBarrett outlined how it could work in the Dáil last Thurs & explained it later to @LeoVaradkar
You must put into operation an emergency programme and fund it properly. ‘Cos otherwise you will go down in ignominy.
You owe it to those two women I know who have already been abused by the system you preside over who were shattered to be told they were officially invisible, one of them after hearing you on radio boasting about your master plan. You owe it to their babies rendered non-existent.
You can follow @DonalOKelly.
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