SINN FÉIN TD for Sligo-Leitrim Martin Kenny received apologies from members of the public after tempers flared at a public meeting on refugee accommodation in Ballyshannon, Donegal last week.

A public meeting was held last Thursday night in the Breesy Centre, Cashelard, outside of Ballyshannon, after reports that a local guesthouse was to be used as temporary accommodation for 90 international protection seekers.

The meeting was attended by two TDs for the area, Sinn Féin’s Martin Kenny and Independent TD Marian Harkin who both said afterwards that the meeting got out of control and was dominated by a minority of extreme voices. 

Speaking to The Journal, Harkin said the meeting was called at the last minute and “taken over by the stronger voices.”

It was reported by Ocean FM last week that a guest house in the area was to be used to accommodate 90 international protection applicants. However, it was later reported that the owner of the property had not yet signed the lease with the provider. 

Since then, the owner has told local politicians that he has no intention of signing any lease with the third party provider for the temporary accommodation. 

Kenny said this point was made by a local councillor at the meeting but that people were “very sceptical”. 

Speaking to The Journal, Kenny said the meeting got “very nasty at one stage and difficult”.

He described some of the anti-immigrant comments made at the meeting, and the reaction to them, as “quite dangerous and frightening”.

“People were asking questions and if you attempted to answer all you got was shouted at,” he said.

Kenny has since appealed for calm in the area. 

“A lot of local people came up to me afterwards and apologised,” he told The Journal.

“These people that are peddling that agenda and are angry about these things are trying to fire up hate and fear and anger in everybody and it doesn’t matter if Jesus Christ re-arose and went there to talk to them, they would treat him the same,” Kenny said.

“A woman rang me to say how sorry she was, quite a religious woman, and she said ‘I was thinking of Pontius Pilate when I was at the meeting and if somebody at the back of the room had of started a chant ‘crucify them, crucify them’ they’d all have joined in,” Kenny added.

Harkin agreed that there were some extreme anti-immigrant views presented at the meeting, including one person who equated asylum seekers to rapists and murders.

Kenny said his sense is that the situation will “cool down over time”.

He added however that last week’s meeting and the proposal to accommodate male asylum seekers in a rural area, which quickly developed into a “high tension, anxious situation” and was used by some to “spread fear and demonise foreigners”, was a lesson for everyone. 

In a statement given to local media on Sunday, Kenny said: “To make progress it is important to have clear communication and work with facts, in a calm atmosphere.  The government system around accommodating, and processing asylum seekers is broken and has been for a long time.

“The housing crisis affects people in almost every family in the country and intense competition for stretched health services and school places also make the potential arrival of new people difficult.”

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said on Monday that the number of asylum seekers arriving in Ireland this year “is a much smaller number than other European countries are experiencing relative to population”. 

“Yes, we’ve accepted a huge number of Ukrainians in Ireland, more so than other western European countries, but when it comes to asylum seekers the portion is relatively low.”

He added that it is a myth to suggest Ireland has an open-border policy.

“I do want to reassure people that migration in Ireland is rules-based. I hear absolute myths about us somehow having an open borders policy or rolling out the red carpet and welcoming people to come here irregularly,” Varadkar said.

“That is just not the case.” 

In the aftermath of the fire in a hotel in Galway at the weekend, he issued a statement to say that Ireland has a “rules-based system” for processing asylum seeker applications.

“All asylum seekers are registered, fingerprinted, checked against watch lists, and the circumstances surrounding their request for asylum are examined thoroughly,” the Taoiseach added.