TD warns sites earmarked for asylum seekers will face strong opposition regardless of location

A LOCAL TD has expressed his horror at the burning down of a property in Dublin that had been wrongly rumoured to have been earmarked to house asylum seekers.

Sinn Feín's Martin Kenny condemned the attack in the Ringsend suburb of the capital which saw the recently-sold Shipwright Pub – which was to have been converted to house homeless people – set on fire amid incorrect speculation that asylum seekers were to be sheltered there.

The Gardaí said they were treating the incident as arson with a spokesman adding: “An Garda Síochána is aware of a significant volume of misinformation, disinformation and rumour in relation to the use or proposed use of the building.”

Kenny insisted that the attack went against the values held by the majority of Irish people.

He said: “What happened in Ringsend and Dublin was absolutely scandalous and outrageous that anyone would burn property that anyone would be looking to have a place to sleep in.

“It's just shocking that people would resort to that. Of course this isn't new and has been a trend over the past number of years. We've seen properties attacked and vandalised and sometimes arson attacks on them as well.

“People have to be responsible. It's quite fine for people to say that they have legitimate concerns and all of that. But when it goes to the stage of some mad-hatter who will go out there – or perhaps something even more co-ordinated or organised by small groups of people where they'll go out and burn and destroy premises – it really is a deplorable act.

“It does not reflect what the vast majority of Irish people stand for. They stand for inclusivity, they stand for unity and they stand for generosity.

“To think that around the days of Christmas, we were putting limits on our generosity and how to accommodate people is just wrong and I think the vast majority of people recognise that.”

Kenny meanwhile insisted that the government uses land and property that it already owns for their scheme to place asylum seekers into centres instead of buying up private properties.

He added: “This is a plan that has for some time been in the making as the government have been talking about this in the last couple of years.

“What the plan is would be stateowned and state-run accommodation instead of using private properties and putting up hundreds of people.

“All that is fine in theory and, hopefully, would be an advancement of where we are at the moment. But one of the major issues will be where they are located.

“The government and the state has large quantities of land across the country which hopefully can be utilised for this. That is what we need to see happen instead of the government going out and spending money to buy sites.

“Wherever they go, I expect there will be people who will put up all kinds of objections of why they don't want foreigners living near them or whatever.

“That's all well and good but at the end of the day, we have an obligation internationally to ensure that we look after people who come to the country as well as looking after the people who are already in the country.

“It's going to take a bit of time to do this. We're talking about a couple of years before this will be in place. In the meantime, we have a lot of difficulties in many places across the country.”