Pinned to a board in the Lighthouse Apartment complex in East Wall, Dublin, last week was a note from a group identifying themselves only as “concerned residents” living in the inner-city district.
The notice was to “let everyone know what is happening and why”.
“The protests are not about race, we as a community are diverse and multicultural. We do not want anyone living here in the area that have come from other countries to live and work and feel unwelcome or unsafe due to protesting,” it said.
“This is about the lack of care our Government has for all of us, every nationality living here. We were told it was Ukrainian women and children coming in, who we would have helped how we could. We are also not saying all men coming are violent or predators but with no checks, no background info, it causes understandable concern.
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“Our apartments that face the building can be looked into from all floors.”
The note went on to detail concerns about violence and “sexual tension” and “utter disaster for our area”. Children would no longer be able to play on the grounds of the complex, it warned.
“We cannot let this continue.”
Metres away, a number of male international protection applicants wheeled suitcases and carried their possessions in plastic bags through the door of the old ESB building, many of them having been moved there directly from tented accommodation.
‘Out, out, out!’
There were a handful of unidentified people waiting for them, holding their phones aloft, recording the men as they entered the building.
One woman shouted: “Where are you from? You won’t be here for long because we are going to get you out! Out, out, out! Go and fight for your country, wherever you’re from.”
Another man labelled them the “scum of the earth”.
Two nights later, hundreds gathered at the East Wall road to protest over their arrival.
One speaker, Nigel Murphy, representing the residents’ group, told the gathered crowd that East Wall is a multicultural neighbourhood “and we want to keep it like that”, saying that the issue was nothing to do with race. The issue, he said, was that 150 men were moved into the ESB building without consultation.
Before he spoke, there were shouts of “they don’t belong here” while some carried placards stating “no more scammers, enough is enough”. With growing tension in the air, the official residents group dispersed. Within minutes there were other speakers telling the crowd: “This is it. You are being replaced. You go and try to get a hospital appointment. How long are you waiting? Well you’re going to be waiting longer from now on.”
‘Government neglect’
The response from politicians was swift. Sinn Féin TD Eoin Ó Broin told RTÉ's Morning Ireland that the refugees in the building were not responsible “for decades of Government neglect.”
“Protesting against refugees and asylum seekers is not the right approach,” he said.
There were similar reactions from Labour and the Social Democrats. Fringe elements on the far right and far left were both mentioned by Opposition politicians.
But it is now clear that there are simmering tensions in many more communities beyond East Wall, and it’s not just so-called fringe elements that are contacting their local politicians.
The scramble to find accommodation for incoming refugees has been well publicised with briefings from Government in October outlining that the State was reaching capacity. In desperation, empty office blocks such as the ESB building are being hurriedly repurposed.
One source in the Department of Children told The Irish Times this week: “There is a chance that almost every town will be touched by this issue.”
Politicians of all hues agree that in their own localities, there is pressure and apprehension.
‘A lot of questions’
In Dublin Mid-West last month, residents in Clondalkin raised questions after they learned about plans to move more than 180 single male international asylum applicants into Dolcain House, an empty office block on the Monastery Road.
After the decision was made to place the asylum seekers in the block, local politicians including Sinn Féin TD Mark Ward met officials from the Department of Children. “At that meeting, we were informed that if there were any changes we would be informed as elected reps. This didn’t happen,” Ward said. Instead, he found out during a housing committee meeting in recent days that the contract could be extended.
The Clondalkin local electoral area hosts one of the highest number of refugee arrivals in the whole Dublin area. Independent councillor Francis Timmons said that people consistently point this out to him. “But it’s a big area,” he counters, while acknowledging that there are genuine pressures on the number school places.
When it came to Dolcain House, “I was getting a lot of questions,” he said, many of which were legitimate concerns. “But other messages I got were very racist. I don’t tolerate any form of racism. We shouldn’t blame people who are escaping war and persecution. There were genuine concerns, however, because suddenly there is an office block that has 180-plus men in it.”
He took the residents’ questions and met representatives of the company running the block. “One of the questions was, why are they all men? Why are there no women and children? The reality is, and I can say as a member of the LGBT community myself, around the world it is just not accepted in many countries. Furthermore, some of the men are separated. Some of their marriages have broken down. Some of them have become displaced from their wives who are living in this country in a similar set-up but just for women and children.”
The men in question are mainly from Georgia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Algeria and Ukraine. Cllr Timmons said that while many members of the community were happy to have answers to their questions, he was forced to block some people from his social media channels.
“There still are some people who want it [Dolcain House] closed down. I am aware of that. But there is nothing to hide here. I spoke with the gardaí in Clondalkin who told me that nothing has been reported. But social media is a powerful tool.”
[ Pat Leahy: Protests in East Wall, judicial reviews in Dublin 4Opens in new window ]
More sensitive
While the issues in East Wall and Clondalkin revolve around former office blocks, there are other properties where the situation could prove to be even more sensitive. In Cork, Labour TD Seán Sherlock has been contacted recently about a plan to co-locate refugee accommodation with an educational site. While Mr Sherlock did not want to comment on any specific details of the site, it is understood he has spoken with Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman about the concerns being raised with him by parents. It is not the first time this issue has come up.
In recent weeks in Meath, parents of students in the Franciscan College in Gormanston voiced anxieties about their children sharing a school campus with more than 400 Ukrainian refugees. There were reports that meetings between parents and the school’s board of management became heated.
At the start of this term, the principal of the Franciscan College sent a letter parents promising them that child-protection matters were fully considered and that any interconnecting doors between the buildings were locked. The letter, seen by The Irish Times, shows the efforts the school went to in order to reassure parents.
“Let me reassure you that the College is very aware of our responsibility when it comes to all matters regarding child protection. We rightly place the highest level of importance to this. All Ukrainian refugees staying in Gormanston Park are facilitated in an accommodation setting which is separate from the college. From the establishment of Gormanston Park some years ago we have insisted on there being physical separation between the two organisations within the building, any interconnecting doors are locked.”
Speaking more generally, Mr Sherlock says that if there were legitimate concerns in any community, they should be “addressed head-on”.
“All people want is information, to be kept in the loop and to see that the information flow is transparent. If parents are coming to me about what they are hearing about a co-located site with an educational establishment, a school for example, there should be a process set up with an identifiable person where the school community can broadcast out to parents any information.”
“We are all so tuned in to child-protection issues, we are hypersensitive to the need to ensure minors are protected. That is the mode every adult in the country is in. So, if there are legitimate concerns, let’s address them head-on with a proper process.”
‘Information vacuum’
Communication was a central theme of a meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Housing this week, where Fine Gael TD Alan Dillon spoke about recent events in Mayo. A new international protection centre recently opened at the former Breaffy Sports Arena in Castlebar but Dillon said that throughout the process, “there was a huge issue around transparency”. The issue was that locals were not kept in the loop about what was happening and how many asylum seekers were arriving.
“People feel that the rug is being pulled from underneath them. And they want to support this, make no mistake about it, they want to integrate these people into schools and sporting clubs. But they are getting second-hand information. And there are people filling that information vacuum.”
His colleague in the area, Fine Gael Councillor Donna Sheridan, also intimated recently that there is a level of secrecy around where refugees are being placed in Mayo. She told a local radio station at the end of October: “There are people and children being housed in a business park in Castlebar. The businesses in that park were never informed these people were coming. It is not acceptable from a health-and-safety perspective. There is no communication with elected representatives or anyone in the area.”
The questions arise: why has the flow of information to local communities been so sub-optimal? Is the Government planning to address this, and how? And what effect does it have on the wider political sphere if the situation is left unaddressed?
Changes afoot
The Irish Times spoke to several senior politicians and officials across the Coalition about those three key questions.
One source in the Department of Children indicated that changes are afoot. Until now, officials in the department “just did not have the time,” to engage in outreach efforts, as the “resources available have been focused on the day job of finding accommodation, because where we fail at that, people end up homeless.
“We don’t ignore the need to engage with communities. But the speed at which we need to move means that we can’t do that engagement months, weeks or days in advance. That has been perceived as people being snuck in. So now we must focus on how to do a good information piece and a good integration piece,” the source said.
The department wants to bring NGOs on board to advise on the best model to put in place for engagement. “We are urgently looking for people who have experience and can be forward-facing.” The Government is particularly looking at the recent model put in place for the roll-out of modular units where there has been engagement with all local politicians.
“There are remarkably fewer issues coming forward under this model,” the source said. This involves face-to-face talks with local politicians about the plans for the area. Some resources in the department will be reallocated for these plans. To tackle rumours and deliberately misleading statements from actors on the extreme end of the political spectrum, there will be information provided across every county explaining what the process will be if refugees are moved in locally.
‘Dumping ground’
Another senior Coalition source confessed to being worried about the direction of travel for Irish politics, especially given the fact that war continues, refugees will continue to arrive and the housing crisis will remain acute.
A poster of party leader Mary Lou McDonald was held aloft, which triggered a chorus of booing and ‘f**k Sinn Féin’
The source said that it was not normal that Ireland had managed to avoid immigration being a feature of our politics, and that it is possible that 2023 would be the year it becomes contentious. One figure also noted with interest how some protesters at East Wall targeted Sinn Féin. There, a poster of party leader Mary Lou McDonald was held aloft, which triggered a chorus of booing and “f**k Sinn Féin”, a phrase rarely heard at any protest in recent times given the party’s recent historic gains and evident popularity in the polls.
Senior Sinn Féin politicians have made it very clear in recent weeks that they do not tolerate refugees being targeted by protesters and won’t accept any anti-immigrant rhetoric. Only last month, Sinn Féin TD Kathleen Funchion strongly distanced her party from comments made by a party councillor who said his area was being used by the Government as a “dumping ground” for refugees.
Many political commentators have expressed a belief in recent years that the far-right movement has failed to get a strong foothold in Irish politics because Sinn Féin has been the political home for ardent nationalists. In other countries, these same people might be drawn to parties of the right. The anti-Sinn Féin chanting at last week’s protest could show that some of those voters might be thinking again about their political home.
The Irish Freedom Party was heavily involved in encouraging people to attend the East Wall protest. The party’s president, Hermann Kelly, tweeted this week that the Government was sending out “search parties looking for more economic migrants attracted by free stuff”.
Speaking to The Irish Times, he described the party as a “nationalist, Eurosceptic”, one “which believes in putting the national interests first”. He claims it is “the very opposite of far right”.
Asked about the anti-Sinn Féin comments at the protest, he said: “Sinn Féin are not the vanguard of the working class but the mudguard of woke multinational corporations.”
‘I think we need to adjust to this as being a permanent feature of life. We need to have much better, almost permanent, communications with local communities’
Regardless of anyone’s voting intentions, no one can say that the Government was not warned about the dangers that might lie ahead. Former secretary general of the European Commission Catherine Day submitted a report earlier this month to Government in which she warned of the potential for “racist tension and confrontation”. It was part of a wider call for the State to use emergency powers to build accommodation.
Day is clear about what needs to be done: “What we have already seen is people protesting against what they see as decisions taken overnight without their knowledge. I understand, because it is an emergency situation, it is a question of finding somewhere to sleep tonight, tomorrow night. But I think we need to adjust to this as being a permanent feature of life. We need to have much better, almost permanent, communications with local communities so that there are no surprises.”
Scrawling notes
Some days after the note was pinned to the wall of the Lighthouse Apartments by “concerned residents”, other people living in the complex discovered that someone had made some amendments to the printed text, scrawling notes in blue ink around the page.
The new introduction read as follows: “Don’t make innocent people the target of hate. Request reliable info and clarity.” For every point made in that original note, a counterpoint was raised. For example, when the original note said that locals were happy to look after women and children, this writer asked: “what about fathers?”
When the note detailed “understandable concerns”, the person writing in blue pen asked: “Security is in place, right?”
When the author of the original note wrote about impending “sexual tension”, their respondent wrote: “Tendency to think this way is sexist.”
When they wrote: “our children won’t be able to play downstairs”, the response was: “Never seen kids playing in two years.”
Finally, where they signed off as “concerned residents”, this was written beneath: “Stop fear culture. Truly concerned residents.”
