WATER IS NOW BEING RATIONED. That’s in the Skellig Star Hotel, in Cahirsiveen, which is being used as a Direct Provision centre, despite it being described as ‘completely inappropriate’ by a public health official. 32 residents are in the third day of hunger strike. I named the owner in the Dáil this morning, and the fact that I named him seems to have been of greater concern to Varadkar than the welfare of the asylum seekers.

Today in the Dáil, we challenged Minister Flanagan over the appalling treatment of asylum seekers in Direct Provision during the Covid crisis. The conditions there are an abuse of human rights at the best of times, for the 6,000 plus residents, but at the time of Covid, they may well be fatal. We now have 149 cases in 10 clusters. The government farmed out ‘care’ of asylum seekers to for-profit companies which costs the taxpayer €70 million a year. The people of Cahirciveen have shown magnificent social solidarity with the 120 assylum seekers packed onto a bus and sent down there – would that the government had as fraction of their decency.