Ireland

Of Francesca Totolo
The Government has changed, as well as policies relating to migratory flow. The new ministers, supported by the broad consensus of citizens, they try to remedy the licentious agreements and against the interests of the Italians themselves of the Renzi-Gentiloni executives, which provided for the indiscriminate opening of ports to NGO ships and those of European missions. The result is clear to everyone: more than 600 thousand irregular immigrants arriving in Italy and the Mediterranean reduced to an open-air cemetery. Maybe one day someone will have to answer for these 14 thousand deaths (give UNHCR 2015-2018).
What few people know though secret agreements signed bilaterally by Prime Ministers Renzi and Gentiloni and by their counterparts from other countries, to make sure that all immigrants collected at sea were brought only and exclusively to Italy. It was last July when the undersigned e Luca Donadel we noticed a ship from Irish Navy which shuttled between the Libyan SAR zone and the Sicilian ports with a rather suspicious frequency. Dublin was not included in the European Frontex mission at the time, EUNAVFOR MED Operation Sophia, which included as a collateral activity the rescue of migrant boats in danger under the coordination of MRCC of Rome.
We thus discovered Operation Pontus, a bilateral pact drawn up in 2015 which involved Renzi's Italian government (then reconfirmed by Gentiloni) and the Irish one, independent of European devices. The agreement, kept silent to Italian citizens and without any mention on the Government's institutional websites, predicted that the immigrants transshipped onto Irish Navy ships in the Libyan SAR area were disembarked in Italian ports. No national press has ever documented the landings of the Irish ships even though they all occurred regularly in Catania, e, at the same time, no one ever mentioned Operation Pontus. Read More