Are racist attacks on the increase in the Republic?

Are there signs that the warm welcome so many migrants have received there in the recent past is beginning to cool?

That's what we're discussing on this week's Red Lines and we're talking about it because it's an issue that's forced its way to the top of the news agenda in the South.

And there are concerns in some quarters that it's something that

could be starting to generate some real political traction. It's a complex issue, of course it is,

and I'm pleased to say I've been joined by three journalists who've written on the topic and

to understand very well just how multi-layered it is. Kitty Holland is the Irish Times social

affairs correspondent. Daniel McConnell is political editor of the Irish Examiner and Féinin is Ireland editor of the Irish Independent. Welcome to all of you and thanks very much indeed for joining us on this week's Red Lines. Kitty, just to demonstrate how challenging this subject is. You wrote a piece about a violent attack on a migrant camp in North Dublin last week.

And that article then prompted a stream of abuse directed at you and your paper on social media.

Would you talk us through what happened?

Sure, yeah.

Well, I mean, you know, as social affairs correspondent, I've been covering the housing crisis here

for, you know, close on a decade.

And one of the aspects we're beginning to see of the real hard edge of it is a sort

proliferation of kind of lit small-tented communities, gatherings of tents of homeless people.

And we got some information that there was a small tented community on the banks of the

River Tolco, which is a small river in North Dublin.

And so I went to check it out with a photographer, Darry Macdonal, on Saturday,

the 28th of January.

And we went out there.

Now, we weren't, you know, we weren't knowledgeable about who

we were going to meet out there, whether they'd be Irish, whether they'd be foreign, whether they'd be

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