On the Blackwater River in deepest County Waterford lies the town of Lismore, famed for its 17th-century cathedral, 800-year-old castle and bustling weekly market, where farmers sell some of Ireland’s most sought-after potatoes.
With a population of just 1,350, its quiet charm draws free-spending visitors during the tourist season, filling tearooms and pubs and propping up the economy in the process.
Yet this summer, any visitors to Lismore will face a problem — there will be nowhere to stay. The town’s only hostelry, the Lismore House Hotel, has just announced that its imminent planned re-opening, following a big post-Covid renovation, has been cancelled.
Instead, the Irish government has decided that this 18th-century landmark, reputedly the oldest surviving purpose-built hotel in Ireland, will henceforth start a new life as a ‘direct provision centre’ housing refugees and asylum seekers. No fewer than 120 will be billeted there until further notice.
News of the plan has stunned the town, whose population will grow by almost 10 per cent. Locals were kept in the dark until the last weekend of January, just 72 hours before the new residents began to arrive on buses from Dublin.
A bride who had booked wedding guests into the venue — motto: ‘Indulge, delight and unwind’ — suddenly found herself in the lurch. Families who had arranged christenings and first communion parties in its function rooms were given the boot.
The tourist office, which had hitherto been negotiating for bus tours to billet guests there, was forced back to the drawing board.
There followed three days of protests, attended by 300 people — just under a quarter of Lismore’s residents — bearing signs saying ‘Save our main street’. Led by a plasterer named Brian Buckley, the protesters stood on top of a van outside the hotel’s front door, asking via megaphone how the town’s already stretched GP surgery and schools would cope, and wondering what might happen to local businesses reliant on tourism.
‘We’re a heritage town and this is an iconic building in the centre. It’s madness to use it for this,’ Mr Buckley tells me. ‘There has been absolutely no consultation with local people, no consideration of how the town will be affected and no plan for where these people will end up or find jobs.
‘Lismore isn’t anti-refugee. We already have 20 or 30 in our town. They are very welcome — and I have nothing against the new people who are coming here. We are not protesting against them, but against the government which put them here.’
Others were not quite so reasonable. On the second day of Mr Buckley’s peaceful protest, a far-Right activist named Derek Blighe — the founder of a group named Ireland First — rocked up in the town with a small but sinister-looking cabal of supporters.
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