Nuala Haughey says net was for people who had not complied with deportation orders but others got caught
By yesterday afternoon the immigrant grapevine was buzzing with news of the Garda operation in Dublin to arrest illegal immigrants.
While the Minister for Justice denies that the initiative is part of a new, tougher policy, it certainly has struck fear into the thousands of irregular migrants who have outstayed their welcome in Ireland.
This is a varied group that includes asylum-seekers whose claims for refugee status have been rejected but who have not complied with efforts to deport them, as well as people working here illegally.
Yesterday's move was an attempt by immigration gardaí to wrestle with a paper backlog of 2,610 outstanding deportation orders, some dating back three or four years.
But gardaí from the National Immigration Bureau as well as those from Dublin's 17 divisions cast their net wider than this category. As well as arresting five failed asylum-seekers, they detained 36 people living here without permission who were not asylum-seekers or undocumented workers.
This number is a tiny percentage of the thousands of non-nationals working illegally in Ireland, without whose contribution some businesses would not survive. By definition, they live clandestine lives, paid less than Irish workers and daily facing the insecurity of being detected.
It is an open secret that prospective employers pay cash in hand to asylum-seekers, even calling into reception centres to "recruit" workers.
The Garda National Immigration Bureau has seen its staff increase under Chief Supt Martin Donnellan and this trend is set to continue. That Operation Hyphen included "ordinary" gardaí from Dublin divisions is an indication that they are attempting a more co-ordinated approach to the enforcement of immigration laws.
Refugee and immigrant support groups do not quarrel with the State's right to deport people and police its immigration laws. However, they have universally criticised the manner of yesterday's "round-up" and have raised concerns that a type of racial profiling could creep into immigration controls.
Clearly there is a certain absurdity about today deporting an illegal worker from an EU candidate country such as Latvia who, two years from now, will be able to come to Ireland without a work permit.
Since he took office, Mr McDowell has talked tough on immigration issues. He contends that the EU's failure to tackle illegal immigration will fuel racism and could discredit the entire asylum system.
To his credit, he has been at pains to point out that one in four foreign faces here belong to people legally resident as workers or students. Gardaí estimate that some 100,000 foreigners are legally registered to be here, while the number of asylum applicants has averaged about 9,000 a year for the past few years.
But the tone of the debate in Ireland and Europe, and the tendency to talk about illegal immigrants as one homogeneous group, means that "immigrant" is fast becoming a dirty word.