“This is not an anti-immigrant protest,” said independent councillor and Ballaghaderreen native Micheál Frain last Sunday before heading out to a candlelit vigil to protest against rising crime rates in the small Co Roscommon town, a 45-minute drive south of Sligo town.
“We don’t want this to be dragged into something that it’s not about. Ballaghaderreen is a most open town. This is about dignity and respect for people,” he said.
That didn’t stop outside agitators from attending the demonstration. Among the hundreds of local people who turned out were a small number of anti-immigration activists including members of National Party splinter group Clann Éireann and self-styled “citizen journalist” Philip Dwyer.
At one stage, Dwyer attempted to interrupt a speech by Frain calling for more Garda resources in the town.
“You’re a mouthpiece and we know you are,” Frain shot back to cheers from the crowd. “You’ve been going around the length and breadth of the country stirring hatred. The people of Ballaghaderreen will stand together as they have always done.”
Speaking on Tuesday, Frain said he was happy with how the event went. “He wasn’t used to that,” he said of Dwyer. “He wasn’t used to people putting it up to him.”
The local councillor’s interaction with Dwyer went viral online, drawing a huge amount of praise but also threats and false accusations that Frain is an “NGO stooge” who profits from asylum seeker accommodation. Frain said he was now considering legal action.
The Co Roscommon town has been in the public eye before but usually for more positive reasons. In 2017 it was held up as a model of integration after taking in 240 Syrian refugees. A “Welcome to Roscommon” committee was established and locals donated toys and other goods.
More refugees from Afghanistan followed and received a similarly warm welcome. In 2018 the town was awarded the Rehab People of the Year award for its efforts.
In some ways, this was to be expected. The small town has a long history of welcoming migrants. There has been a Pakistani community in Ballaghaderreen since the 1980s, many of who work in the local Halal factory.
By 2022 that year’s census showed 39 per cent of the town’s 2,400 residents were from outside the State. Since then, a further 100 refugees from Ukraine and 84 international protection applicants from Africa have been placed there.
Despite the welcome, this has put enormous pressure on the town’s resources, locals say. Last year, only four children starting in the local national school spoke English as a first language. There is a lack of doctors, houses and, most pressing, gardaí.
Tensions in the town started to increase markedly when significant numbers of eastern Europeans moved into the area and were placed in often substandard accommodation in some of the ghost estates left over from the Celtic Tiger years.
Some of these new residents, who are mainly from the Roma community and permitted to live in Ireland under EU residency rules, have been accused of engaging in low-level offending such as theft and antisocial behaviour, gardaí say.
Matters came to a head in the early hours of last Friday morning when gardaí responded to an incident of trespassing at a derelict building in the town involving two teenagers of similar age.
An allegation was made that one of the teens, who was from the Roma community, had sexually assaulted the other, who came from a Traveller background. Garda sources describe the ongoing investigation as sensitive and say it revolves around whether what took place was a consensual act or not. Both parties are minors and cannot be identified by law.
News of the incident spread rapidly through the town and became increasingly distorted in the retelling. By Friday evening, various prominent far-right social media accounts with no connection to the town were claiming a child had been raped by a foreign national. In some cases, African or Middle Eastern immigrants were falsely blamed.
Late on Saturday night, about two dozen people descended on the town. Many wore balaclavas and some carried baseball bats or other weapons.
The group, which gardaí believe were related to the alleged victim of Friday’s incident, targeted two properties where members of the Roma community were living. A Garda spokesman said two homes were damaged but there were no injuries.
Prominent anti-immigration figures continued to spread false information about the attack, including Hermann Kelly, leader of the anti-immigration Irish Freedom Party who falsely suggested in a post that a “minor boy” had been “gang-raped” on the street. When contacted by The Irish Times about these claims, Kelly responded with a video of him saying that was “the word going around locally”.
Other accounts posted the address of someone they claimed was the attacker and threatened to reveal their name.
We have been promised more doctors, more school places. We were promised the sun, moon and stars but nothing has been delivered
— Sharon Byrne Murphy, Ballaghaderreen Concerned Citizens
This led gardaí to issue a statement warning about a “significant degree of misinformation” being spread online about the incident and stating it does not involve anyone seeking international protection.
In the past, Garda headquarters paid little attention to the spread of false information online. However, recently it has started trying to counter efforts by far-right activists to falsely implicate asylum seekers in alleged crimes.
The Garda statement may have lowered the temperature in Ballaghaderreen if not on social media. However, it did little to address the concerns of many locals who complain of rising crime rates.
“We want a visible Garda presence in the town. That’s the overriding issue,” Claire Kerrane, the Sinn Féin TD for Roscommon-Galway and a Ballaghaderreen native, said. “It has been getting worse for the last year and it culminated last week. There’s a fear here that wouldn’t really have been in the town before that.”
For Kevin Duffy, the owner of the local Supervalu, the main problem is shoplifting. “It used to happen every week. Now it happens several times a day.”
There are some locals very uncomfortable with some of the anti-immigration stuff. There are others who agree with it entirely – and there’s people in between
— Ballaghaderreen local
Getting a Garda response could taken between “45 minutes and six hours”, he said.
“People are latching on to the issue to blame refugees but in the last five years I think we’ve had one incident of a refugee stealing,” Duffy said, adding that some of the main culprits were from other EU countries.
In a statement, Garda headquarters confirmed that “resources in Ballaghaderreen Garda station have reduced in recent months” but said one sergeant and four gardaí were assigned to the town.
Kerrane expressed scepticism over the figures. “If we had four gardaí, we’d be shocked and happy. The problem is they’re assigned to Ballaghaderreen but they’re not in Ballaghaderreen,” she said.
Some locals feel betrayed by what they see as unfulfilled Government promises of increased resources to accommodate the rising population numbers.
“We have been promised more doctors, more school places. We were promised the sun, moon and stars but nothing has been delivered,” said Sharon Byrne Murphy, chairwoman of Ballaghaderreen Concerned Citizens and one of the organisers of Sunday’s anti-crime protest.
“The number of people coming in is far in excess of anywhere else in the country,” she said, but emphasised that her group had little time for anti-immigration extremists attempting to hijack the protest.
However, it may be oversimplistic to attribute anti-immigration sentiment entirely to outside influences.
Another local, who asked not to be named, shared screenshots of several posts shared in the Ballaghaderreen Concerned Citizens page from far-right accounts.
Another post on the page accused the Government of failing in “protecting us from being overrun by illegal immigrants who have no care or consideration for our way of life”.
The local person said there had been a noticeable increase in anti-immigrant feeling in the town, including anti-refugee sentiment.
“It’s not straightforward,” said the local. “There are some locals very uncomfortable with some of the anti-immigration stuff. There are others who agree with it entirely – and there’s people in between.”
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