In the small town of Newtown Mount Kennedy, a holding centre for people who have just arrived in Ireland seeking asylum lies in the wooded grounds of Trudder House, a former convent. The building itself is disused and off-limits. Instead, men arriving from countries such as Somalia, Sudan and Nigeria are housed in 12-16 makeshift tents, separated from the town by a 10ft-tall fence daubed with graffiti reading “Newtown says no”.
Craig Bishop, a retired GP who is part of Newtown Together, a group of volunteers trying to support the camp’s residents, said the barricade created an immediate sense of “them and us”. “They come all this way for protection only to be behind a 10ft fence to be protected from who? From the locals,” he said.
Even before it was established in May, the camp in NTMK, as the town is known for short, had been a focus of controversy. When word got out in March that the site would be used as a centre for some of the 16,000 applicants for international protection who have arrived in Ireland this year, tensions mounted, with 24-hour protests taking place outside the property.
In April, attempts by the police to disperse the crowds resulted in violent clashes, and five people were charged. Local people protested that the demonstrations had been peaceful and turned nasty by outside antagonists fuelled by an anti-immigration narrative.
Last month a group of migrants said they were charged by a driver who mounted a pavement with his car, coming within “five or six inches” of them, as they walked back to the camp.
The tension comes a year after unprecedented anti-immigration riots in Dublin, rapidly fuelled by the far right and social media. In an update this week, the gardai said 53 people had been charged over the violence, including a 28-year-old man who was sentenced on Wednesday to six and a half years in jail for arson and rioting.
The riots started hours after three children and a school care assistant were stabbed outside a city centre primary school. The violence may have receded from global headlines but across Ireland the tensions remain, exploding in various acts of hostility and violence towards refugees and migrants.
In July, people with knives and pipes attacked 15 asylum seekers sheltering in tents in central Dublin. There has been a sharp increase in arson on properties across the country linked to accommodating asylum seekers.
Touting slogans such as “Ireland is full” and “Irish lives matter”, small far-right parties have so far failed to make a political breakthrough but are making more noise than ever. Several independent candidates are running on anti-immigration tickets in next week’s election.
Forty minutes south of Dublin in County Wicklow, NTMK seems to be a lesson in how not to approach a sudden rise in migration, with flimsy accommodation, barricades and no political input contributing to a breakdown in communication between local groups of supporters and opponents.
Hostility to the centre appears to have been allowed to fester. Men in the camp say rocks have been thrown over the fence and, more recently, fireworks, which they say could have endangered lives.
“For me, the worst is the spitting. They look at you and spit, not physically at you but away from them as if to show their disgust,” said Nawras, a Palestinian from Jordan who was taken to NTMK after arriving in Ireland in July. “Some of them look at you and hold their nose and walk backwards, and stay in eye contact with you, as if to say ‘you are smelly’.”
An archaeologist with a master’s degree and fluent English, he recalls the night of the car charging. “One of the guys came running in saying ‘I can’t stay here, I have to leave’, ‘they tried to run over me’. He was saying he wanted to get out immediately. The man was terrified, he was at the front of the group,” he said.
Nawras has now been moved to new temporary accommodation in Galway and is “glad to be out of there”. He was philosophical about what he saw in NTMK. “It is a basic fear of the unknown. It is a big step for these guys [the locals] to speak with us and look at us with different eyes and get to know us as people.”
Other asylum seekers simply ask: “Why do they hate me?”
Newtown Together includes dozens of locals trying to help the men who have been left to their own devices in the tents, widely agreed to be unsuitable in the below-freezing temperatures experienced this week.
Footage obtained by the Guardian reveals a tented encampment offering little protection from the coming winter. On Thursday the department of integration said it was moving all men from the camp to alternative accommodation at a tent camp in Dublin “better equipped to deal with the current weather conditions”.
Denise McAvinia, a member of Newtown Together, said the protests before the camp’s opening were “opposing the lack of communication, the lack of facilities”.
Rachel Dempsey, another member of the group, added: “But when the men arrived, we were thinking: why are you protesting against them? Why are you not protesting at the politicians, at the Dáil?”
The group talks about how difficult it has been in the town. Members avoid some places for meetings and recall vicious verbal abuse at a picnic in the summer. Local contractors are ostracised if they are seen to be working at the camp. Two of the group were “doxed”, their home addresses put online. “Some of the abuse has been very personal,” Bishop said.
As if to underline the tensions, the group found themselves being filmed while they were being photographed for the Guardian. After an initial standoff, the woman with the camera, Teresa Murphy, 67, said she was part of the Newtown Says No group that had graffitied the camp entrance.
She complained that they, too, had been subjected to abuse. “If you look at social media, I’m described as Ireland’s ‘first Nazi granny’,” she said. “I’m not a racist. I have a good heart. The point is we don’t know who these men are. They are only here for three months. There is a new lot coming this week. They have no chance of integration.”
Although she admitted her group could not even say hello to Newtown Together members on the street, they do share concerns about the conditions in the camp. “Human beings should not be in tents in Ireland,” Murphy said. “We are not heartless people. We are just afraid.”
Bishop said part of the problem was the rapid growth in the town, from the old village to sprawling commuter belt housing estates. “People in the old town are not privileged. They are not wealthy, they have never had large incomes or assets and they are angry. And I’m trying to understand why all this kicked off, and I think it’s not dissimilar to the Trump voters. They feel nobody listens to them.”
Melissa Bosch, another Newtown Together member, said the tensions were the “first step” of a wider shift taking place in Ireland. “The shape of Irishness is changing,” she said. “The questions we are asking are: how do we bring the knowledge and understanding up? We need to start with acceptance.”