Hotel picket goes on as arson confirmed

Gardai have established that a fire which damaged a hotel to be used to house up to 40 asylum-seekers in Co Tipperary was started deliberately. Two rooms in the Vee Valley Hotel in Clogheen were badly damaged in the fire which was started early on Tuesday morning.

Residents were yesterday maintaining a 24-hour picket on the premises in protest at the Department of Justice's plan to accommodate asylum-seekers there. They condemned the arson attack. A local Garda source said investigations into the fire were continuing and no arrests had been made. The incident was also condemned by the chairman of a committee elected to represent residents, Mr Dick Keating, who said, "It did us no favours . . ." Mr Keating, a farmer, said the village did not have the infrastructure to take in the number of asylum-seekers proposed.

"The imposition of 40 people into a population of 400 would be akin to adding 120,000 to the population of Dublin or 400,000 to the city of Manchester," he said. The village, at the foot of the Knockmealdown Mountains, eight miles south of Cahir, was prepared to take a maximum of 10 people, he said. Mr Keating said Clogheen did not have the healthcare, education or leisure facilities to accommodate any more families than that. The local primary school was already "packed to the gills" and it needed extra teachers. He also claimed the hotel was too small to accommodate 40 people and putting them there would create a health problem "akin to the black hole of Calcutta". Outside the hotel a small group of residents stood in heavy rain, carrying placards with messages such as "40 is too many for our small village".

A motorist, a woman from outside the area, stopped and called the group "racists". Picketers claimed the label was unfair. Mr Michael Pyne said locals would object to 40 unemployed people coming into the area "with nothing to do but walk around the town all day", whether they were from Dublin, Galway, Clonmel or anywhere else.

Mr Keating claimed officials from the Central Directorate of Asylum Support Services who attended a public meeting in the village on Tuesday night had not been able to answer any of the residents' questions. Residents wanted to know where the asylum-seekers would be from, what their health status would be and whether they might have criminal records.

Asked what would happen if the Department of Justice forced through its plan to put 40 asylum-seekers in the village, he said: "It really doesn't bear thinking about." He did not believe it would come to that. "I think they will listen to us."