Oughterard and What Comes Next

In the small Galway village of Oughterard, locals are celebrating the reversal of a decision to establish a Direct Provision centre in their locality at the Connemara Gateway Hotel. The reversal came as a result of their round-the-clock protest centred at the hotel and throughout the village. 

Before the reversal, the Connemara Gateway Hotel was in the initial stages of being tendered as a Direct Provision centre. Direct Provision, or DP for short, is a scheme run by the Irish Government in order to accommodate migrants who claim asylum in Ireland, oftentimes being put up in hotels throughout the country. 

These asylum seekers are then directly provided for, meaning that their accommodation, food and small allowances are paid for by the Irish taxpayer, whilst the Department of Justice and Equality processes their cases. 

The taxpayer also covers the legal costs for asylum seekers, as well as the lengthy appeals process should their case be initially turned down, alongside their accommodation cost over those years if they repeatedly appeal. The Irish State spends at least €150 million per year on the asylum system. 

Furthermore, many well-connected Irish barristers are able to earn millions from the public purse by representing asylum seekers. This is easily done by pursuing a plethora of legal options and appeals that is offered to asylum seekers, in conjunction with ‘free’ legal state aid. 

The cosy relationship which exists between the political establishment and the legal profession is a large reason for why it takes up to a decade for an asylum seeker to be fully processed by the Irish asylum industry.

The Irish asylum industry and the DP scheme are overseen by the Department of Justice and Equality. That Department is also responsible for tendering out DP leases to hotel owners, many of whom are also eager to get on the public payroll to the tune of millions. 

The owner of Oughterard’s hotel in question is Sean Lyons Snr, who is also the owner of Dublin’s largest DP centre in Clondalkin. And so when he began refurbishment works at his newly acquired Connemara Gateway Hotel, the village of Oughterard began to suspect that they too were set to host a DP centre. 

Throughout the debacle the Fine Gael Government refused to fully confirm or deny their DP tender there, whereas Lyons did confirm the hotel’s tendering in a local meeting. Yet despite his admission, Fine Gael officials remained adamant that they would not disclose any details on the tendering process until after its would-be completion and a centre established.

This same type of informational blackout was seen in the establishment of previous DP centres, whereby the Fine Gael Government would not properly consult with nor inform locals prior to the opening of new centres.

Due to how unpopular DP centres invariably are, the Government usually tries to circumvent holding a democratic local ballot for approval and tries to ‘manufacture consent’ from the local community instead. 

Manufacturing consent is a neoliberal phenomenon which involves the projection upon a populace of only one opinion as socially acceptable, and silences or incriminates any opposition as extremism. An example of this would be the Irish Government soliciting assistance from Non-Governmental Organisations to stamp out any so-called ‘racist’ opposition to government policy.

Despite the title of Non-Governmental Organisation, Irish NGOs receive a lot of their funding from the Irish State and the EU. This means they are really government-funded non-governmental organisations, or quangos in non-Orwellian terms.

These quangos are then operated by ‘anti-racist’ and politically correct ideologues, who are paid to be long arm of the law and the wrongthink enforcers of state ideology. 

Oftentimes their activism comes in the form of astroturfed protests, whereby these ideologues are bussed into some town or village to hold a demonstration. The regional and national media are then primed to report on it, and events are portrayed as if it were the actual locals demonstrating. (This kind of misleading carry-on was exposed by one local woman in Roosky.)

Reactionary ideologues are also at hand in demonising anyone who voices opposition to a particular centre by branding them through traditional and social media outlets as far-right racist and xenophobes. We are seeing ‘Diversity is Strength’ fast become the official Party line, and dissenters will find themselves in some form of gulag if they voice oppositional ‘hate speech’.

One town which did not have their consent directly outsourced and manufactured by the quangocrats was Lisdoonvarna in Co. Clare. There a consultation was convened among locals and a vote held over an incoming DP centre. 

There was an overwhelming 92% vote to reject the DP proposal, but it was still promptly ignored and the DP plans went ahead unchanged. This was in spite of a promise made by the convicted hotel owner Marcus White, son of late Fine Gael TD James White, to not go ahead with his plans if locals did not want it. 

Fortunately, it seems that the locals of Oughterard were better prepared to deal with the underhand tactics deployed by the quango ideologues, greedy gombeens and state officials from the Department of Justice and Equality. They anticipated the imposition of a centre and were able to successfully outmanoeuvre the Government via an entrenched but peaceful protest. 

As a result of that stand-off they have exposed how the migration agenda of the current Government does not actually align with the interests of common Irish people.

The glaring lack of information and consultation from the Department was a clear factor in the discontent of Oughterard, as they felt that their remote village would be inundated with a hundred plus nondescript migrants. 

Outwardly though their protest was based around the claim that Direct Provision is ‘inhumane’ and not, as one might suspect, around their own objection towards being forced to host a foreign plantation.

However, as the Department of Justice and Equality gives more rights to those in Direct Provision, such as the right to work, the claim that these centres are inhumane begins to lose its validity. Therefore, if there is to be further opposition to the asylum industry in Ireland, it will have to be based around the legitimate concerns of the Irish people, in and of themselves.

The most immediate legitimate concerns that should be raised are the severe housing shortage and homelessness crisis in this country. This crisis sees a large number of Irish people being totally unable to rent or afford their own family home, and many Irish homeless being found dead on the streets each year. 

Another major concern is Fine Gael’s Ireland 2040 plan to bring in an additional million migrants over the next 20 years. One can only faintly suppose how these migrants will all somehow be housed somewhere, despite there being over 10,000 homeless here already. 

The retort to their liberal talking point of “Well sure didn’t the Irish emigrate for generations?” is to ask why the Irish diaspora aren’t the very first people we should be welcoming back into the country.

In order to seriously put forth our own concerns, we the Irish people must be willing to become our own advocates. We must be willing to fight our own corner if we do not wish to continually see our needs trampled over by the needs of others, and especially by those of the greedy gombeens and moneyed classes in this country. 

Listening to the officials in the Department of Justice and Equality it becomes very clear that they care more about their international obligations than their national obligation to the Irish people. They do not seem to care that the Irish people are being forced to emigrate abroad en mass due to absurd rents, that their wages are being depressed by mass migration, and that they could even become an ethnic minority in their own country by 2050.

In light of these facts, one could easily state that we are living under an anti-Irish establishment. A tell-tale sign of this reality is that we rarely if ever see the neoliberal and progressive Taoiseach Leo Varadkar address, acknowledge or most of all esteem the Irish people. 

It would simply not fit well overall with his image of caring about equality. This often feigned moral desire for equality is antithetical to the notion that the Irish ought assert themselves as a distinct group against neo-progressive political tyranny.

In light of Fine Gael’s nation-wrecking agenda, we ought to seriously question the desirability of equality as a socio-political goal and re-evaluate whether those who strive for it are indeed as morally virtuous as they wish to appear. In other words, how does one rate equality over hierarchy without contradiction?

In our re-evaluation we also have to be able to point out which exact value is void in the Fine Gael mindset and the Irish political establishment in general. The simple but counter-intuitive answer is that Fine Gael (or any establishment party) do not believe that the Irish people ought to exist in their own right. 

Or if they perhaps secretly do believe it, then they lack all moral conviction to honestly voice that right. If they did have the conviction and the political will to back it up, then they would actually take up the appropriate measures to ensure the wellbeing, continuation and full realisation of Irish life.

If it were so, then Fine Gael would not be working against the interests of the people of Oughterard, Lisdoonvarna, Roosky, Wicklow, Moville etc. to foist the asylum industry on their towns and villages. 

Fine Gael would not be subjecting asylum seekers to multiple years of legalistic limbo, so that their buddy barristers and hoteliers can gorge themselves from the public trough. 

Fine Gael would not be flinging open the borders in the midst of a severe housing crisis, so that the incoming housing demand enriches the landowners and that cheap foreign labour can ‘keep the recovery going’ for big business alone.

Oughterard should serve as a fine example of how victory can happen when people power takes direct action to protect their community from the asylum racket and governmental gombeenism. Oughterard is both a lesson and a wake-up call to the people of Ireland to stand in solidarity with one another in the face of a ruling class which holds them only in sheer contempt.