Qwee bo-no

There’s a place not too far away from our home called Ballinrobe. As a town it’s not much more than a crossroads. Just a place on the N83 north from Galway city to Castlebar. It has a racecourse and a tiny town centre you do not want to have to take a large truck through. This is a quintessential rural western Irish market town. Trying to negotiate the streets around six on a Friday evening is a bit of a nightmare. Because of this I try not to go through there at any time when it’s likely to be busy. There are faster and better ways south to Galway or north to Sligo and Donegal.

Recently this has made the national news with local protesters getting up in arms about the new migrant hostel being set up there. Of course all the protesting locals are branded by the ignorant as ‘far right’, which I can tell you is a foul and flagrant lie. Because the main thrust of the protests are being driven by the local female population. The womenfolk have even complained that it’s hard to get their menfolk out on the barricades, saying that they are more interested in sports or the pub. So, ‘far right’? No, but not far wrong either.

Yet the Dublin centric media, ensconced in their cushy offices prefer to throw cheap political labels at them, totally dismissing the genuine concerns of small town Ireland with unpleasant rhetorical slime. Effectively telling the locals that they should shut up and go home. The media, safely ensconced in their little metropolitan bubbles, think that all the sympathy should go to the asylum seekers, none for the communities they are dumped onto. After all, according to the dazzling urbanites, those of small town western Ireland are simply the ‘little people’, and as such of no consequence.

Which to me sounds like what our colonial cousins in North America would cynically call a ‘snow job’, or what the inhabitants of the British Isles would refer to as ‘a whitewash’.

Me, I look at all what the local Irish are calling ‘plantations’ (and this is a very emotionally loaded term throughout Irish history) and wonder who is making money out of all this. Because there has to be a net benefit to someone, somewhere, doesn’t there? And we know it’s not the local economy.

Well actually there’s a lot of money to be made out of asylum seekers. Much of it from tax money raised from the natives. Let’s work backwards. 

First there’s property development companies that seemingly spring up overnight, funded by entities outside of Ireland. They make money by buying up larger properties like hotels in financial trouble or shut down by the COVID debacle. Then charge the taxpayer to house the asylum seekers in the style to which they would like to become accustomed. 

These companies buy up buildings and political influence, charging the taxpayer for the privilege via virtue signaling politicians, then skim the profits before no doubt, eventually fading into the air leaving naught but a Cheshire catlike grin behind them when their skullduggery is latterly exposed. This isn’t the precise process, but as Canadians say it’s “Close enough for Government work.“ Looked at from the correct angles the whole ‘asylum’ thing has all the air of very well organised crime. The kind that owns banks and politicians type of criminality.

Then, working backward further, there are the networks of various pro-migrant NGO’s, who firstly raise money off urban public sympathy for the ‘oppressed’, and here is one of the rumours I’ve come across, also take darker money from the people trafficking gangs who promise the migrants the world and an easy life if they just uproot themselves from their home nations and jump straight into an alien culture. 

We know that said NGO’s are active in migrant holding centres and on transit routes between countries. Even in the originating countries themselves. Yet they too are making money from the ‘migrant crisis’. Then have the sheer brass to lobby politicians and convince them that it’s only being ‘fair’. And of course we have to help these poor, oppressed (Allegedly) ‘asylum seekers’, legitimate and law abiding or not.

Incidentally, the native Irish people, especially around County Mayo, I would like to tell you, are some of the most fair minded and welcoming souls it has ever been my pleasure to encounter. And they feel their legitimately genuine concerns about having forty odd dubious characters from God alone knows where suddenly dumped in the neighbourhood are being dismissed and demonised by their own political class. The locals are worried about things like the increase in crimes like violence and sexual assault that are known to follow these ‘people dumps’ happening in various areas. So naturally they oppose them.

Our neighbours welcomed Mrs S and I two years ago into their hearts and homes with a generosity and openness I have rarely encountered anywhere else in this world. They are good people. Better in some ways than we deserve to know. A friend down in County Clare referred to Mayo folk as “Kind, gentle people.”. But they are people worried not about the odd one or two foreign born (and self supporting) families moving into the area, but busloads of potentially problem single male freeloaders being dumped on their doorsteps. And they would like some breathing space. 

Twenty or thirty years of it on a much, much smaller scale for preference.

But there’s no easy taxpayer funded money to be made from that, is there?