THE TRANSFER OF dozens of families seeking international protection into Dundrum in Tipperary could not have gone much worse.
Women and children were given little notice before they were bussed in the middle of a chilly night last month to a remote part of west Tipperary, almost 200km away from where many had been building their lives in Dublin.
Some women described their children crying when they arrived outside the small village of Dundrum on 13 August. They were greeted by the sight of an estimated 70 locals facing off against heavily protected gardaí outside the gates of Dundrum House.
Within 48 hours, matters got worse. It emerged that staff at the hotel were not Garda-vetted as required – despite already having been working with Ukrainian refugees for over a year – and had to be sent home immediately.
With a skeletal crew in place made up of emergency IPAS staff, it made adjusting to the new surroundings only more difficult. It also made them feel particularly vulnerable due to the “daily intimidation” and racial slurs flung at them by people who could easily gain access to the 220-acre site through its golf course.
As they tried to manage the new surroundings, families realised how difficult it would be to keep up their lives in Dublin. It’s a nearly six-hour round journey on the bus for those still trying to get to their jobs in the capital, while teenagers and children found it hard to cope when it became clear that they wouldn’t be going back to their old school.
Transport issues were compounded as the government’s International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) had yet to assign a designated bus for IPAS families in Dundrum.
John Lannon, the chief executive of human rights group Doras, said the difficulties faced by residents “underscore” the broader issues within the IPAS transfer system, where decisions are “often made without considering the individual needs and best interests” of children and families.
Lessons need to be learned by the government from Dundrum, he said. This is all the more crucial as it readies for the opening of the next major IPAS site at Thornton Hall in Dublin.
“Lack of preparation, insufficient trained staff, inadequate security, and poor access to services and supports all contributed to the sense of fear and isolation” that the residents had in the early weeks in Dundrum, Lannon said.
“We appreciate the huge strain the state is under to find accommodation for asylum seekers, but more needs to be done to keep people safe while their applications are being processed.”
Families remember the trip to Dundrum with a sense of anger and even fear.
“They were triggering what we have tried for months to suppress,” one African woman aged in her 30s said of the trip to Dundrum.
But that trip sowed the seeds of an atmosphere of distrust and little confidence in the department and the new IPAS centre.
The women moved there are concerned about being able to find jobs in the area, particularly when they were already working in Dublin.
“Do I expect those people protesting against me to be the ones to employ me? We are just single mothers with kids. As much as they do not want us here we do not want to be here.”
When contacted over recent weeks about various issues in Dundrum House, the Department of Integration said it was continuing efforts at engaging with the management and residents of the hotel.
A spokesperson said the safety and wellbeing of the people seeking international protection is of “paramount importance” to the department and that it had held ‘customer service clinics’ to try to address the families’ issues.
Educational welfare officers from Tusla were also liaising with the centre’s management and parents to secure school places for all children in the centre.
It’s now 107 days since the protest formed and took up residence outside the hotel gates. It began in May after plans to expand Dundrum House’s use beyond Ukrainian refugees to include people seeking international protection became known.
The protesters told The Journal throughout recent weeks how deeply emotionally invested they were in guarding the future of the hotel against being used as a shelter for people in need of international protection.
One leader of the protest said she and many of the community had “spent their summer” camped outside the gates at the hotel in their bid to prevent asylum seekers being housed there.
One man who did manage to take a break away in Kerry with his family found he “was thinking about Dundrum the entire time” for the holiday. A fear of the village becoming “unsafe” and losing out on its economic prospects due to the loss of the hotel governed his thoughts, he explained.
The core arguments of many members of Dundrum Says No revolved around wanting to see it returned to commercial use and a belief that the area lacked services to accommodate new arrivals.
Some members went further in their arguments and spoke of how the area risked becoming “unsafe” due to the arrival of the families.
The protesters felt strongly that this was not a sign of racism and claimed it was a reasonable response, despite the fears of the women and children in Dundrum House.
Just prior to the arrival of the families, protesters had engaged the services of a Westmeath man who would represent them in an High Court injunction over the site. This man, a vegetable farmer called Patrick McGreal, said he was self-taught in the law and believed there were ways to prevent the use of Dundrum House.
More than 200 affidavits were signed and brought to the High Court, but were roundly rejected by Mr Justice David Holland who said the application by residents was claiming that international protection applicants were “more likely to be burglars than those staying as guests at the hotel or Ukrainian refugees”.
Refusing the injunction, the judge said he would “lend no weight to that assertion” by some of the affidavits.
When one spokeswoman was asked about this in recent weeks, she defended the claims linking asylum seekers with criminality: “We can’t tell everybody what to write on their affidavit and what to say, because some people here do have very different views on the situation and different ideas and concerns.”
These weren’t the only documents that would play a role in Dundrum. Last month, the Department of Integration launched an investigation after letters were issued to a number of families warning that food and housing may be “reduced or withdrawn” in Dundrum House.
The department said these “fall short” of the communication expected for residents and it was seeking to “verify” the letters.
The situation mirrored similar letters which were said to have been circulated claiming that Ukrainian residents were set to be evicted. These claims turned out to be false.
When The Journal visited the site last month on the day that gardaí were able to safely escort the 80 asylum seeker families in to the buildings, it found protesters trying to regroup but unsure what to do.
They haven’t settled on a next path just yet, with some discussing whether they should stand down the protest later this month.
The protest has been made up of many local businesses and locals who had some connection with the site, some in very deep ways. Andrea Crowe’s family owned the hotel before it went into receivership during the recession, while another man, Martin Ryan, had fond memories working for the Crowe family as a porter and meeting his wife there.
Elsewhere, there were prominent business people from the wider area – Alison De Vere Hunt runs the Cashel Mart for trade in cattle and livestock, and had become a spokesperson for the protest with some media. Like Andrea Crowe, her family business suffered significant loss in the recession.
Among the signs erected outside the hotel was one carrying which said ‘Yes’ to ‘Ukrainians’, ‘golf club’, ‘gym’ and ‘venue’ – in that order. The bottom of the sign said ‘No’ to ‘racism’ and to ‘IPAS’.
On another day, protesters were pictured holding a sign declaring that the protest was “supported by local golf members” – some of those using the hotel’s golf course.
Another protester, Noel Ryan, is from the area but owns a farm in Honduras in Central America. He was opposed to the housing of people seeking asylum at the site and cited claims that the identification documents used by some to enter Ireland may be incorrect or false as being an issue, explaining that he had needed correct documentation when he went to Central America and became involved in land and property there.
The protest has been gifted support from other quarters. One affidavit aiming to bound longstanding residents and new arrivals to keep the peace within the confines of Dundrum was signed by peace commissioner Mary Hennessy, a resident of nearby Cashel and the chief executive of Aiseiri, a network of rehabilitation clinics for alcohol and drugs across the southeast.
Hennessy told The Journal she thought the injunction would be an attempt to “keep things peaceful” in the area, saying she didn’t want a “riot happening” in the locality as seen elsewhere. She added that she had signed the injunction as a favour to a neighbour, but said she would not have done so if she “had known more” about the injunction.
“Maybe in hindsight I shouldn’t have signed it,” Hennessy said. “I’d only hope for the best of all those people in [Dundrum House], I think they’re really being failed there,” she said, adding that she has done much work with people from various ethnic backgrounds.
Some of the figureheads among the protest believed that if they got confirmation that the hotel may return to commercial use within the near future, then it may be easier for the community to accept the current situation and they would stand down the blockade.
In a statement this week, Dundrum Says No said that while there are “no immediate plans” to end the protest, it “continuously keeping the situation under review”.
“Our focus remains on highlighting the same concerns, namely the unsuitability of the premises for such a centre and the lack of necessary local services and infrastructure to support it,” the group said in an email.
The timing of the Dundrum protest was likely important in how it played out.
It became the next big protest at an IPAS centre right after several days of violent disorder in Coolock, which saw more than 20 arrests.
There was an opportunity for the protesters in Dundrum to pitch themselves as the peaceful alternative – an article in the Irish Examiner from early August, a few weeks before IPA applicants come to Dundrum, saw the group outline that they are “such a contrast to Coolock” in Dublin.
“We have been very afraid of that [the disorder at Coolock] happening here, so we have been vigilant of keeping outside elements out,” one protester said.
The protest came under pressure to retain this more moderate stance from anti-fascist and other activists in Tipperary. When Crowe was asked about the efforts to keep far-right agitators away from Dundrum, she pointed to a message she had helped to draft for the protest’s Facebook page on the morning of the clash with gardaí.
This message on the group, where there were over 1,200 members at the time, criticised “outside agitators” who appeared in Tipperary that morning “looking absolutely gleeful” about the standoff.
“They do NOT represent us,” the Facebook page said. “We are, again, calling for peace.”
“People have different ideas for how we should do this and it comes down to that,” Crowe told The Journal afterwards.
After the asylum seekers were housed in Dundrum in recent weeks, there was an attempt by the protesters to pivot the protest into one positioned more in favour of the families and specifically against the hotel owners and IPAS. They cited how they provided sweets and toys to the children of the families as an example of this.
But the protest was heavily criticised for its behaviour and rhetoric up to this point.
Doras and Every Child is your Child – the two Limerick human rights groups – said that from their visits to Dundrum House they found that many of the new residents faced intimidation and racial abuse on a daily basis. They said that children were witnessing this happen to their mothers.
The protest maintained that none of its members were responsible for this series of incidents, but Doras and other locals in Dundrum who were uneasy with the protest believe that Dundrum Says No, in its use of signage and other aspects, emboldened more extreme and bigoted behaviour from some in the wider community.
A commitment was given that the protesters would review the signage such as the ‘No to IPAS’, although these remain up around the site.
Some members of the protest, while not in leadership positions, had regularly been posting fake stories about asylum seekers on their personal social media.
One man reshared a debunked story celebrating a US army soldier for killing two Syrian men for the rape of his daughter. “Fully Decommissioned Both Perpetrators,” the Tipperary man wrote on his page. The story is false and now carries such tags on Facebook.
The formation of a group called Tipperary Welcomes in the days after the clash with gardaí also served to put extra pressure on the Dundrum protest. Although it did not name Dundrum or any location, this statement said there was an “atmosphere of fear” which made it very hard for ordinary people across Tipperary to speak up in favour of welcoming migrants.
That statement carried just over 70 signatures of people and a number of community groups from some of Tipperary’s many towns and villages and within days after going public grew to more than 300 people.
It eventually included elected representatives from a number of political parties and members of 25 civic and community organisations hailing from dozens of towns and villages in Co Tipperary.
The statement was considered a turning point by one woman who was among the more than 300 signatures. “I do think it emboldened more people to speak up a little bit. I’m getting a phone call every now and then from someone looking to help – there’s a whole network out there that wants to help.”
Dean Buckley, a member of Tipperary Welcomes who spoke in a personal capacity, recalled colleagues getting “literally shouted down” when they would try to speak up in favour of asylum seekers at public meetings in the county.
He praised some elected local politicians from Sinn Féin and independent-style collectives such as Workers and Unemployed Action Group for taking “slings and arrows” due to their support for Tipperary Welcomes, but was critical of others.
Buckley said there was a sense of politicians from government parties looking to “keep their heads down and wait for all this to blow over”.
At the other end of the scale, one local councillor “denounced Tipperary Welcomes as ‘do-gooders’, like a comic book villain”, the 30-year-old explained.
“Frankly I lay the lion’s share of the blame for the atmosphere of intimidation on the vast majority of elected officials, both government and independents, who have had little to say about the rise in far-right activity in Tipp,” Buckley said.
“I appreciate some have faced abuse and harassment themselves but that should be all the more reason to speak up and speak out.”
The new group potentially helping people to find their voice has resulted in more locals in Dundrum willing to come forward to offer help with families at the former hotel, according to one volunteer.
“The reality of these women and children coming here, like how can you feel threatened by that? We don’t know where it’s going but people do feel more comfortable helping out now.”
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