Martina Devlin: Failure to get to grips with migration has allowed the far right to infect our politics

The ‘tent city’ on Mount Street near Dublin’s international protection office should have been dealt with much sooner. Photo: Getty

Martina Devlin

If a national newspaper is a record of one day in a country’s life, what would any edition of this week’s Irish Independent indicate about the state of Ireland? Judging by the column-inches metric, what’s revealed is anxiety about the spike in migrants arriving here, and impatience with the Government’s faltering steps to take control of the situation.

Wherever anyone stands on the migrant question, and most people are inherently fair, the way the situation has been allowed to spiral is a cause for concern across the board.