The Labour Party has attacked the recent Garda "Operation Hyphen" on illegal immigrants as hypocritical and a waste of resources.
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About 500 gardaí were involved over the two separate days of the operation. On the first day last week, 200 gardaí staged early morning searches on over 100 addresses in Dublin and arrested more than 40 people.
This Tuesday nine people were arrested for deportation and 92 other people were arrested under the Aliens Act during the second phase, which focused on addresses outside Dublin and involved 300 officers.
Mr Pat Rabbitte, Labour’s justice spokesman, claimed this morning the operation was a case of overkill and a waste of Garda resources.
"There is a fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of government policy on immigration," he alleged. He cited this morning's revelation in The Irish Timesthat the former Minister for Justice, Mr John O'Donoghue, made the highest number of representations to the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment on behalf of employers for work permits for non-EEA nationals over the past year.
This is despite the fact that he was the author of the much-maligned "Zero Tolerance" regime that was dedicated to the deportation of illegal immigrants, Mr Rabbitte said.
"Now that a grateful nation can sleep easy in their beds confident that foreign mushroom pickers are being hunted down, is there any chance that Minister McDowell and Commissioner Byrne might turn their formidable intellects to catching some real criminals or to tackling the anti-social behaviour and so-called joyriding that is making the lives of ordinary people a misery in so many parts of urban Ireland?" he asked.
The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, has defended the Garda operation, saying around 80 per cent of economic migrants posing as refugees were diverting resources from genuine asylum applicants.
