Refugees have been good for our town. But we feel the State has abandoned us
Ballaghaderreen welcomed asylum seekers with open arms in 2017. If you read just one article today, make sure it’s this illuminating dispatch on how communities can make immigration work – and the implications of the Government getting it so wrong
EVEN the hardest of hearts melted just a little when elderly Ballaghaderreen shopkeeper Mary Gallagher explained to RTÉ television reporters why she felt compelled to welcome Syrian refugees to her home town.
‘When you see a child being picked up in Aleppo out of the clay, how could you say no?’ she asked them. It was a stunning answer to an awkward question.
Back then, in early 2017, most residents in this small remote town on the Roscommon/ Mayo border were determined that the couple of hundred Syrian people destined for a new Emergency Reception and Orientation Centre (EROC) should feel at home.
Questions were asked and there was disquiet from some quarters about why Ballaghaderreen, with a population of less than 2,000, had been picked as a suitable spot to accommodate so many desperate people fleeing a country destroyed by war.
But others fervently believed that this was the very reason they should be accepted and helped.
The townspeople rallied, setting up a welcome committee, while existing clubs organised ways to help integrate, comfort and inform those who would be initially spending two to three months staying at the old Abbeyfield Hotel, which had been closed since the recession.
It was a beautiful response to a tragic situation.
The rest of the country was heartened by their story, and the community was duly rewarded, winning a People Of The Year award in 2018, presented at a glitzy bash in Dublin’s Mansion House. The local youth club took the top prize at the Aldi Foróige Youth Citizenship Awards, for its work with teenage Syrian refugees, involving them in social evenings, pool games and a host of other activities.
Such was the goodwill that the BBC landed in the town to document the experiences of shell-shocked Syrians who found themselves in the west of Ireland, thousands of miles from home.
Hotel for Refugees, also shown on TV3, was hailed as a ‘powerful and highly emotive’ documentary.
Local businessman and chair of the Roscommon Leader Partnership, Micheál Frain, winces slightly at the mention of the TV show that aired in the autumn of 2017, about six months after the first refugees arrived.
‘A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then,’ he says. ‘There were a lot of “wait and sees”. I just wonder if they came back again, would they get the same reaction.’
It would seem the answer to that question would be a resounding no. While attitudes in the town to those who have fled here from warzones are still largely benevolent, there is palpable frustration at the lack of services that followed in the wake of the EROC being opened.
‘This could have been dealt with brilliantly early on,’ says Frain. ‘I often say that if they’d had a dart board in the shape of Ireland and they hit Ballaghaderreen, they couldn’t have hit a better spot to put their EROC. ‘They could have held us up as an example of best practice. Instead, it’s come back to bite us and there are a lot of people who are very fed up.’
Perhaps Ballaghaderreen was a perfect spot. For more than 30 years it’s had a significant Muslim population thanks to a meat plant opened in the 1980s by a Pakistani entrepreneur. It closed in 2008 with a loss of 170 jobs, but many of the foreign-born workers stayed.
‘We were always used to nonnationals here,’ says Frain.
But while attitudes may be progressive, local services have failed to move with the times and according to Frain and many others the Irish Daily Mail spoke to this week, the town is at breaking point, with limited access to GPs and dentists, oversubscribed schools, as well as a limited public transport system.
Not only have they experienced the intake of new residents at the old hotel, but the population has grown exponentially thanks to an influx of Ukrainian refugees, people from other parts of Eastern Europe and some from Africa. No where else is this new demographic more evident than in the local primary school, St Attracta’s NS.
Principal Noel Loftus proudly shows off a huge wall chart that hangs in one of the corridors, which illustrates the flags of all 22 nationalities which attend the school — from Albania and Afghanistan to Romania and Ukraine — and who now make up about half of the pupils.
At the helm since 2018, Loftus was responsible for opening the school up to children staying at the EROC.
‘Welcoming children from Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea has been a privilege,’ he says. ‘We love having them in our school, we want them, they enrich our school.
‘But we want to be able to support them as best we can to help them reach their potential. The difficulty with EROC is that last September, suddenly and with no consultation, they shut down the school they had there.’
He describes it as a ‘step-down facility,’ where four primary school teachers helped prepare kids for the realities of an Irish classroom. Many of them were seriously traumatised and some had never been to school before because of war.
‘So we now have to try and put those supports in place here,’ Loftus explains. ‘We identified their emotional needs and, crossed with the fact that a good few of our children are from the Roma community, one of the things we felt would help was a nurture room, a safe and quiet place where they can work with staff.’
He says the Department of Education won’t fund such a venture, so they’ve had to use their own money and divide up an existing room into two smaller rooms, in a building where space is already limited. Since he started at the school the number of enrolled pupils has gone from 220 to just under 300.
‘We applied for additional staffing, special needs assistants [SNAs] in particular, which is a hurdle in itself, there’s so much paperwork,’ he says, his voice thrumming with frustration. ‘But we were turned down. I can’t understand why, with the needs that we have.’
In 2022, the school was granted
DEIS status, which recognised the educational disadvantages of some of its pupils.
‘That was very welcome, it increased our funding and reduced our pupil teacher ratio,’ he says, but then he points out that they still have only three SNAs for the entire school.
‘They’re telling us to give support to the child with the greatest need, the problem with that is, you constantly have to reprioritise what the need is. It’s not about learning for many of these children, it’s emotional support as well.’
There are other issues: a closed down, much-needed local library that looks unlikely to open again any time soon, and an approved €6million extension that is supposed to deliver ten new badlyneeded classrooms and two autism units. But the severe delays due to lack of responses and action from the Department of Education, says Loftus, have been agonising to deal with.
He’s watching with unease the protests, arson attacks and growing unrest at attempts to open refugee accommodation centres in other towns across the country.
‘Ballaghaderreen has been in that space for a considerable amount of years,’ he says. ‘It was held up as a model of “Céad míle fáilte” and inclusivity, and that certainly did happen. All the clubs and community stepped up, and we continue it in the school.
‘But the national resources to assist us, to sustain us, simply aren’t there.
‘From my understanding, Roscrea is insisting on supports upfront. That didn’t happen in Ballaghaderreen. We believed at the time that the resources would come. They didn’t.
‘We want to give every child in our school the same. If you’re going to welcome new migrants in, you must make sure the resources are there so we can do that, without taking from one to give to another.’
Down on the main street, at Sajjid Hussain Saj’s barber shop, he insists we drink freshly-made coffee as we talk. The Pakistani man came here more than 22 years ago. Head of the Tidy Towns committee, the father-of-five helped set up a local cricket club, which enjoyed some success for a while, and is currently running Refugee Support Ballaghaderreen.
‘I was at the very first welcome meeting for the people in the EROC,’ he says.
‘There were concerns at the start, rumours and bad leaflets filled with lies posted in people’s doors. But there have never been any bad incidents in this town.
‘The problem is with the Government, the system is really bad. We are supposed to have a new health centre, but it’s taken too long for it to be built, they keep coming back with problems.
‘It’s the same with the education facilities and access to other very important services, they’re not dealing with it properly, so people are struggling. That’s what leads to people protesting, and then the Far Right, it gives them ammunition, which is really sad.
‘Ballaghaderreen could be such a good example, but we have to keep fighting and asking and writing to them, it’s all so slow.’
He hopes Irish communities will continue to empathise with asylum seekers who have fled serious conflicts and inhumane regimes.
‘I often have sleepless nights after listening to their stories, how their families died and their homes were destroyed,’ he says. ‘I was speaking to a Syrian man in Boyle only last week, he’s Irish now he’s here so long, but he was crying like a baby. His father, sister and brother were all killed, he’s still struggling with all those things in his head.
‘For people coming from these places, to arrive to slogans like “Ireland’s Full”, it’s awful. I still remember every moment of kindness that was shown to me after I first arrived here, every smile and kind gesture. When you are new and come from trouble, those moments you remember forever.’
In a charity shop across the road, one volunteer acknowledges, however, that some attitudes in the town have changed.
‘It’s for a multitude of reasons,’ they say. ‘There are still really good people in this town, but services are completely stretched. For instance, you can’t get into a dentist, even if you can pay privately.
‘We used to get groups of Syrian women who’d come in here for a couple of hours, to sit around and chat over a cup of tea. But it’s different now, unfortunately. There are frustrations that weren’t dealt with, which is a huge shame.’
Local politicians say there is ‘stuff in the pipeline’, for Ballaghaderreen, but are unsure of exactly when any of those projects will come to fruition.
There’s hope they might benefit from the extra funding Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced on Tuesday, in the wake of ugly scenes at Roscrea, for areas most ‘under pressure’ due to numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. And a promise of extra resources in health, education and policing.
‘We’ll keep asking,’ says Micheal Frain. ‘But it comes back to the institutions of the State.
‘What tends to happen is that interagency groups are set up, they come down and visit us, but we don’t see a lot delivered on the ground.
‘All that goodwill is now in short supply. Then there’s the bush telephone that starts up, about how all them immigrants are getting medical cards and cars but we’re getting nothing. It’s not true, none of it, but that’s the perception that spreads.
‘It gets to the stage where the most liberal-minded people begin to start wondering, are we being sold a pup?
‘I’m afraid I’m listening to people now in this town and their main line is “our town is gone”.
‘Everybody knows it’s down to dealing with civil servants, it’s a slow process, but this is an important issue, one that could roll out of control very, very fast.
‘It needs swift action, a serious, high-level taskforce to deal with it.
‘I’m listening to interviews all week on the radio and it’s almost like listening to the replay of a tape from this town in 2017, it’s depressing. Something needs to change, now.’
‘There have never been bad incidents, the problem is with the Government’ ‘We believed the resources would come. They didn’t’