On the Blackwater River in deepest County Waterford lies the town of Lismore, famous for its 17th-century cathedral, 800-year-old castle and lively weekly market where farmers sell some of Ireland’s most prized potatoes.
With a population of just 1,350, its quiet charm attracts spenders during the tourist season, filling tearooms and pubs while supporting the economy.
But this summer, all visitors to Lismore will face a problem – there will be no accommodation. The town’s only hostel, the Lismore House Hotel, has just announced that its forthcoming planned reopening following a major post-Covid refurbishment has been cancelled.
Instead, the Irish Government has decided that this 18th-century landmark, said to be the oldest surviving purpose-built hotel in Ireland, will henceforth start a new life as a ‘direct supply centre’ for refugees and asylum seekers. No fewer than 120 will be billeted there until further notice.
News of the plan has stunned the city, whose population is expected to grow by nearly 10 percent. Locals were kept in the dark until the last weekend in January, just 72 hours before new residents arrived on buses from Dublin.
Three days of protests followed, attended by 300 people – just under a quarter of Lismore residents – who carried signs reading ‘Save our High Street’. Led by a plasterer named Brian Buckley, the protesters stood on a van outside the hotel’s front door and used megaphones to ask how the city’s already overstretched GPs and schools were doing, and what might happen to local businesses operating on the dependent on tourism
The town’s only hostel, the Lismore House Hotel, has just announced that its forthcoming planned reopening following a major post-Covid refurbishment has been cancelled
A bride who had booked wedding guests into the location – motto: “pamper, delight and relax” – suddenly found herself in the lurch. Families who had hosted baptisms and first communion celebrations in the function rooms were able to enjoy the boot.
The tourist office, which had previously negotiated bus trips to local residents, was pushed back to the drawing board.
Three days of protests followed, attended by 300 people – just under a quarter of Lismore residents – who carried signs reading ‘Save our High Street’. Led by a plasterer named Brian Buckley, the protesters stood on a van outside the hotel’s front door and used megaphones to ask how the city’s already overstretched GPs and schools were doing, and what might happen to local businesses operating on the dependent on tourism.
“We are a historic city and this is an iconic building in the centre. It’s insane to use it for that,” Mr. Buckley tells me. “There was absolutely no consultation with local people, no consideration of how the city will be affected, and no plan for where these people will end up or find work.
“Lismore is not against refugees. We already have 20 or 30 in our city. They are very welcome – and I have nothing against the new ones who come here. We are not protesting against them, but against the government that brought them here.’
Others weren’t quite so reasonable. On the second day of Mr Buckley’s peaceful protest, a far-right activist named Derek Blighe – the founder of a group called Ireland First – rocked the city with a small but sinister-looking group of supporters.
He recorded a social media video denigrating newcomers as “fake ugees” scrambling for free housing and welfare. Angry words were then exchanged with counter-protesters who carried placards reading “Refugees are welcome”.
The Gardai kept an eye on the proceedings.
To a casual observer, this eruption of political tensions in a picturesque hinterland of what is reputedly the most laid-back country on earth might seem unusual. But actually the opposite is the case. For in recent months, similar scenes have been playing out in small towns across Ireland.
The reason? Amazing fact: Around 28 percent of the country’s entire hotel and B&B bed stock – more than one in four – is occupied by refugees and asylum seekers.
The main reason for this is a surge in immigration, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, which has forced the Irish government to accept 73,000 newcomers.
To put that number in context, Ireland’s population is just 5.1 million, which means that 1.5 per cent of the country’s residents are refugees or asylum-seekers in government care. If Britain were in a similar per capita position, our treasury would need to house and feed more than a million refugees.
Earlier this month, a migrant from Moldova who arrived in Ireland in September was charged with sexually assaulting a girl in Ballymun, another working-class area of Dublin. At his bail hearing, the court found he suffered head injuries after being confronted by up to 40 “vigilantes” before police arrived to arrest him
Trying to cover that number of heads, in a country already suffering from acute housing shortages, has resulted in thousands of men, women and children being housed in vacant office blocks, industrial plants and even tents, along with rooms in pretty much especially any hotel whose owner signs a government contract.
In rural Ireland, asylum seekers and refugees have been bussed to small tourist towns like Killarney in County Kerry, where a population of 15,000 has joined 3,000 refugees. In the cities, large numbers of foreign nationals have been accommodated in predominantly working-class neighborhoods, where the arrival of unemployed single men can cause severe social tensions.
The result has been that an initially warm welcome for refugees has been replaced by growing tensions, with no fewer than 307 anti-migrant demonstrations taking place over the past year.
The issue dominates Irish politics. Polls show voters by a wide margin (56 percent to 30 percent) believe too many migrants have arrived in the past year. The most hostile demographic are working-class women, two-thirds of whom believe government policies have failed. Many recent protest marches have not been led by gangs of menacing skinheads, but by “concerned mothers” pushing prams.
Almost 80 protests, marches and rallies have been staged in 2023 so far, with many planned for this weekend (including a major immigration event in Dublin). And the mood gets brittle.
On Wednesday, an anti-migration march I attended in central Dublin (one of at least four held that night alone) met with tragedy when a car was driven by Stephen Bedford, 36, a leftist counter-protester was streamed live on Facebook, collided with a small group of protesters. A man he hit at relatively low speed was taken to the hospital.
Bedford has been charged with dangerous driving but denies intentionally hitting protesters and claims they “threw themselves” in front of his car.
Last month, two ugly incidents erupted in Finglas, a working-class area of the city, after rumors spread on social media that a local girl had been raped by a man who had recently arrived in the country.
An angry mob of about 200 people surrounded a police station where the suspect was allegedly being held, and a ringleader told the crowd: “The only way to deal with these c***s is to burn them out in the damn place.” ‘
In another incident, a group of men carrying baseball bats and accompanied by dogs reportedly attacked migrants living in tents in a nearby wooded area.
It later emerged that the rumors had been sparked by fake news: while a sexual assault had in fact been reported, the suspect in custody was an Irish male.
Earlier this month, a migrant from Moldova who arrived in Ireland in September was charged with sexually assaulting a girl in Ballymun, another working-class area of Dublin. At his bail hearing, the court found he suffered head injuries after being confronted by up to 40 “vigilantes” before police arrived to arrest him.
To understand how this happened, we have to turn the clock back to last February.
At the time, Ireland’s coalition government responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by announcing, along with some other EU members, an open-door policy for refugees fleeing the conflict.
The move first garnered international praise for Ireland’s liberal leaders – including the now Taoiseach Leo Varadkar – who have used referendums in recent years to legalize both abortion and gay marriage, transforming the face of a previously socially conservative Catholic country.
In the capital, the vast majority of refugees are being housed in areas such as the Dublin 1 and Dublin 24 postcode zones. These two run-down neighborhoods, where post-war housing estates sit alongside former Victorian slums, are now home to 2,468 and 3,335 new residents respectively
It also allowed Ireland to disappoint Britain, where Home Office mistakes to growing anger had delayed the arrival of many Ukrainian refugees.
But the move had a fatal flaw: unlike in Britain, where the largely successful Homes for Ukraine program placed the burden of housing almost all new arrivals on private individuals, the policy required the vast majority of them to be housed by the state.
The Irish government also managed to dramatically underestimate the number of Ukrainians who would come.
Last February, politicians put the number at 6,000, but in March they raised the estimate to 20,000. By June the actual number had reached 33,000, with 1,600 showing up each week. Around 75,000 ended up arriving, of whom 54,000 are currently being housed in government shelters.
In addition, more and more refugees from other countries are coming to Ireland.
In 2021 Ireland had received just 2,648 “applications for international protection” from asylum seekers – a fraction of the number the UK received per capita. But last year the number skyrocketed to 13,651.
Of these arrivals, 19,741 are now being housed by the government, in addition to the 54,000 Ukrainians. And every week hundreds more join them. Mr Varadkar admitted in a recent radio interview that he expects between 30,000 and 40,000 to arrive in Ireland this year.
For a country with little historical experience of mass immigration – the Irish have traditionally been the world’s most prolific emigrants – the scale of the changes is profound. Even before last year’s events, legal migration had resulted in a population growth of almost 50 percent since the mid-1990s, when it was about 3.5 million.
As a result, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, housing was even more expensive than in the UK – average prices recently hit a record €359,000 (£319,000). Byzantine planning laws mean only about 25,000 houses are built each year and about 11,500 Irish people are left homeless.
One of them, George Sturdy, whom I met at a protest march in Dublin this week, told how he lived in a shared hotel room rented by the government after he was evicted from a stationary caravan.
“I’ve been on a welfare home waiting list for six years and I know people who have been waiting for almost 20 years. There’s a crisis with homes for Irish people and you see them kicking open doors. What do you expect from people like me?’
Sturdy tells me that 61 per cent of asylum seekers who arrived at Dublin Airport in the past 12 months did not have travel documents with them as they had destroyed their passports in flight to hide their true identity and country of origin. I was skeptical at first, but the number is correct – although it doesn’t include Ukrainians and some of the arrivals may not have had travel documents at all.
The most common nationality for asylum seekers in Ireland is not war-torn Syria or Afghanistan, but Georgia, a comparatively wealthy nation on the edge of Europe. This also turned out to be true: according to Irish government figures, Georgia welcomed 2,710 new arrivals last year, a thousand more than any other country.
These numbers point to a profound political failure and a broken system. And, as so often happens when a political establishment drops the ball, it is the working class who suffers the consequences.
In the capital, the vast majority of refugees are being housed in areas such as the Dublin 1 and Dublin 24 postcode zones. These two run-down neighborhoods, where post-war housing estates sit alongside former Victorian slums, are now home to 2,468 and 3,335 new residents respectively.
In the posh Dublin 4 and Dublin 6 zones, where employees occupy high Georgian terraces, the comparative figures are 80 and 51.
“Why aren’t there direct supply centers in the nice corners of South Dublin?” asks Hermann Kelly, leader of the Irish Freedom Party, a sort of Gaelic version of UKIP. “I’ll tell you why: because the people there have the legal means to stop it. So instead of being stuck in neighborhoods where civil servants live, people are dumped in blue-collar neighborhoods instead.”
Kelly compares the “dumping” process to a television drama. “The buses arrive at nine or ten at night, after dark, and suddenly the locals discover that hundreds of people have been scooped into their community. Nobody ever asks her if it’s okay. The first thing they know is the next day when they take kids to school and see groups of men standing on the sidewalk with nothing to do.
This is what sparked a recent wave of protests in Dublin’s East Wall, which began on a night in November when 260 refugees were taken to an abandoned office building previously owned by the ESB energy network. A further 100 moved there a few weeks later under Ireland’s ‘direct care’ scheme, which means asylum seekers receive three meals a day plus a weekly allowance of €38 (£34).
“Busloads of people, clearly non-Ukrainian and mostly single men, were brought into a community of 4,000 that already lacked adequate facilities,” says Malachy Steenson, a local attorney. “These people were just thrown into a working community without giving a thought to what to do all day. So they stand around and fight and drink and do drugs.’
Since November, Steenson has led a group of several hundred locals who gather in central Dublin twice a week during the evening rush hour, blockading key traffic junctions to raise their cause.
This can lead to confrontations with angry motorists. But she also managed to draw attention to her plight. But even then, the response from the Irish political class was surprisingly self-important, with many refusing to address the protesters’ concerns, instead vilifying them as racist extremists.
Mr. Varadkar is a case in point. He recently made the condescending argument that given the country’s long history of emigration, Irish people “should know better” than to complain about newcomers. Protesters, he told the Dail, the Irish parliament, would “gamble accidentally [the far-Right’s] game,” a move he called unacceptable “no matter what problems a country faces”.
In other words, one of the politicians responsible for this unmitigated political disaster suggested that holding him accountable was a bad thing because it might encourage extremists.
In fact, the vast majority of the protesters I met this week were not motivated by xenophobia but by a deep sense of powerlessness.
Your country is a country where two of the three major political parties are in coalition (and therefore responsible for current politics), while the third, Sinn Féin, is even more committed to immigration than its rivals.
“Concerned parents are branded far-right, racist and conspiracy theorists,” said another activist, Paul Fitzsimons. “But we’re just worried. This is about undocumented men being dumped on our streets and shoveled into underprivileged areas.’
According to Fitzsimons, a concerted effort has been made to distance the movement from far-right extremists trying to cash in on the growing anger. Organizers of a recent demonstration asked Justin Barrett, leader of the far-right National Party, to leave.
There will be similarly short process with Tommy Robinson, the anti-Islamic founder of the English Defense League, who has turned up in Dublin to “support the Irish people” by making a documentary.
But the fact that such individuals are making their presence known speaks to an uncomfortable truth: Ireland’s experiment in mass immigration has unleashed dark forces. And the responsible political class has no idea how to put this genie back in the bottle.