I’m watching videos on Twitter of Irish women in tears being pushed around the road by Gardaí in Newtownmountkennedy in order to force through a deeply, deeply unpopular immigration policy, and I am reminded that this is now a familiar sight, and that is an absolute disgrace.
“We live in this village, we live here,” says one visibly upset woman, her voice breaking as she is pushed down the road by a line of public order gardaí, who have blockaded the public road in Wicklow to facilitate the imposition by the state of a centre to hold 150 migrants. A Garda shouts that the women have been given a direction to move, and that they cannot protest in the area – in the area where they live, and work, and build communities, and raise their families.
A woman told Gript’s Fatima Gunning that she had been coming to the protest for a month now even though she was 6 months pregnant. That’s a glimpse into just how upset and worried ordinary people are. Pregnant women don’t ordinarily want to haul themselves around to protests or spend time fretting and worrying about who the government is planning to bus into their village without consultation. They only do so if they are given no other option.
Her fellow protester said the ongoing opposition to the centre for the last month had been entirely peaceful.
It didn’t stop the Gardaí bulldozing the locals – the people of the area – out of the way so that trucks and equipment and materials can be hauled in to ride roughshod over the community’s concerns.
It happened before in Roscrea, and it happened in Finglas, where vans of Gardaí came “tearing up” to the local protest in the middle of the night, shouting and shoving people, and smashing up the local’s gazebo, while forcing through three busloads of migrants into a commercial unit.
I spoke to the women in Finglas afterwards, and I recall their palpable shock and upset that the state had treated them with such disrespect. “This is desperate, what you are doing to us,” one woman is heard saying to the Gardaí in a video from the night. “Do you know what you are doing to this community, do you know what you are doing to us”.
Almost a year later, it feels like half the country is out protesting, from Cashel to Ballina, to Coolock to Ballaghaderreen, and everywhere in between, with 24/7 rolling pickets taking place in some towns, in addition to packed public meetings where seething anger is directed at local politicians – who just keep pointing the blame at Roderic O’Gorman.
Just as is the case elsewhere, the people in Newtownmountkennedy -ordinary men and women with families – find that they are forced to protest because the government refuses to consult with them. Then they find their right to be heard is also effectively being taken away from them too, because a state that orders Gardaí to use force to push its own people aside is trampling on the right to protest when it suits it to do so.
In the same way, it doesn’t seem to matter that the opinion polls show a huge majority of people feel this country has taken in too many refugees, and that the immigration system has burst at the seams, and the government has utterly lost the plot.
The country is in turmoil, and still the numbers coming continue to surge. The reckless and foolish decision to take in more than 100,000 Ukrainians in addition to tweeting to the world that coming here to claim asylum would guarantee a house within 4 months has had a disastrous effect that the government now doesn’t seem to want to control – because the numbers continue to rise.
It seems to make no difference that the majority of people now coming to the country are from places like Nigeria, which are not experiencing war. We are being taken for fools, and the people know it.
As I wrote previously, the Irish state is taking a battering ram to its own people on immigration. The people are being forced, sometimes at the point of a threat of a public order squad baton, to accept surging numbers of people coming to this island. And the country feels like it’s at boiling point.
This cannot continue. The state cannot continue to use its police force against its own people – to push and bully through centres and changes that people don’t want, and that are causing huge upset, fear and resistance. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Gardaí don’t want to do this either. They know that the people in Newtownmountkennedy, like the women in Finglas, are decent people who would never have expected to be treated with such contempt by the state.
I spoke to some locals from Newtownmountkennedy this evening who didn’t wish to be recorded. The general consensus particularly among those with children and the elderly is that they are afraid of what might happen if IPAS houses male asylum seekers in their town.
— Fatima Gunning (@fatima_gunning) April 14, 2024
The government must put its own people before its allegiances to this very widely stretched concept of “international obligations”. We cannot accept any more migrants, and those who came here without passports should be sent home.
Two years ago, we were already facing an ongoing crisis in housing, healthcare and much else. Now billions are being spent on housing asylum seekers while our young people emigrate in their droves; we’re promising medical care to all arrivals while our GPs say they are full, and people are dying because of the chaos in our hospitals; and the government is allowing thousands of people into the country without identification while failing to tackle rising crime rates.
Sending in the public order squad to push around ordinary Irish people is not the answer. A government relying on physical force to implement deeply unpopular polices has lost the right to govern.