Your top stories on Wednesday: Asylum seekers moved from Mount Street; Irish firm warns on EU ban on smoky flavourings for ham and crisps

Asylum seekers being moved from tents on Dublin’s Mount Street

Asylum seekers are being moved from tents at the International Protection Office on Mount Street in Dublin’s city centre on this morning amid a heavy Garda presence.

There are more than 200 tents in the streets and laneways surrounding the office, all occupied by male asylum seekers.

News

• Garda Border policing unit down to just two members: The only Garda unit dedicated to policing illegal migration across the Border with Northern Ireland has been “all but disbanded” in recent years.
• EU ban on smoky flavourings for ham and crisps will cause ‘major economic harm’: The Government was urged to intervene in a move by the European Commission to phase out current methods of adding smoke flavouring to ham, rashers and smoky bacon crisps.
• Dublin Port conservation project lifts lid on hidden heritage of city docks: A treasure trove of heritage items – some unseen for hundreds of years – has been uncovered as part of conversation work at Dublin Port.
• ‘As I opened our bedroom door, there was a neighbour going past. She had blood on her hands’: McDaid family speak out after being informed their case is one of 36 inquests that will not proceed following the introduction of the UK government’s controversial Legacy Act.
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World

• Dozens arrested at Columbia University as New York police put end to Gaza protest: Dozens of students have been arrested after hundreds of New York City police officers entered Columbia University on Tuesday night to clear out an academic building that had been taken over as part of a pro-Palestinian protest.

Reader Queries

• ‘I have not had contact with my siblings for many decades, nor did I attend my parents’ funerals’: Our advice columnist Trish Murphy advises a reader who says: “I have no friends nor any acquaintances, no one ever contacts me, nor vice versa, and I never socialise.”

Opinion

• Michael McDowell: Parents must guide how sex education is taught in schools
• Nick Henderson: Migration row: Have we forgotten these are people we’re talking about?

Business

• Telecoms company Magnet+ investigating possible cyber attack: Telecoms company Magnet+ is investigating a possible breach of its systems that may have exposed the private information of staff and customers.

Sports

• Leinster’s blend of talent and experience should enable them to edge out Northampton: Experience teaches players that to assume can make an ass out of “you and me”, as the phrase goes, writes Gordon D’Arcy.

Culture

• Paul Auster, author and literary star from Brooklyn, dies at 77: Paul Auster, a prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening.

Podcast Highlights

• In the News Podcast: Is the cost of living crisis over?

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