How Ireland's intransigence over Brexit is coming back to haunt it: GUY ADAMS ... trends now
At the end of a long drive through what brochures call 'rolling parkland' on the western outskirts of Dublin, you'll find Ireland's biggest hotel: the four-star Citywest.
Built in 1994, the venue, which boasts 764 rooms and a vast convention centre, became a symbol of the Celtic Tiger boom.
In the noughties, Ireland's newly-minted millionaires would park their choppers on its helipad before swaggering past lakes, statues and fountains on to the first tee of a championship golf course designed by Ryder Cup hero Christy O'Connor Jnr.
On loungers around the 20-metre indoor pool of its spa complex, their well-maintained wives might rub shoulders with strapping players from the national rugby and football teams, who used the hotel as a training base. Between 2010 and 2019, every Taoiseach (Prime Minister) held their party's annual gathering there.
'Citywest is a luxury resort with all that you'd expect on hand: top restaurants, stylish bars, a first-rate leisure club and a rolling 240-acre par 70 golf course,' declared one national newspaper's travel section in August 2018.
Tents and shelters used by refugees and asylum seekers adjacent to Dublin's International Protection Office
Ireland's biggest hotel, the four-star Citywest, has been used to house refugees and asylum seekers since early 2022
But that was then. When Covid struck, Citywest was forced to lock its revolving brass doors. And when the venue eventually re-opened, things looked very different. Specifically: since early 2022, the vast resort has been entirely used to house refugees and asylum seekers, under a contract that in the last financial year saw Ireland's Government pay an astonishing €53.7million [£46million] to its owners.
Some 1,577 Ukrainians now occupy every single one of the bedrooms. Around 565 additional residents, mostly young, male asylum seekers from north Africa and the Middle East, have been sleeping on bunk beds that fill the cavernous main hall of its convention centre.
On Wednesday, the latter group was swelled by 138. They arrived on white coaches and minibuses driven in convoy from central Dublin under the watchful eye of an array of rolling TV news crews.
These young men had endured a disruptive few hours. Until 7am, they'd been sleeping in tents on the pavements adjacent to the International Protection Office, a Government building where newcomers to Ireland must present themselves to lodge asylum claims.
They were then rudely awakened by security guards and given a few minutes to board, with all their belongings, before being whisked away to their new home.
Around 200 empty tents were lifted into refuse lorries by cranes, while a team of men in white hazmat suits tossed away any remaining debris before clearing the pavement using high pressure hoses.
The operation was designed to demolish what Taoiseach Simon Harris has called a 'makeshift shanty town' that had sprung up in the heart of Ireland's supposedly prosperous capital city.
It also marked an effort to defuse a toxic political row that has been escalating for almost two years, over the unprecedented number of refugees and asylum seekers rocking up on these shores. And, as we shall see later, it was also triggered by a simmering dispute over the effects of Rishi Sunak's Rwanda policy.
Refugees and asylum seekers have been sleeping in tents on pavements adjacent to the International Protection Office where newcomers to Ireland must present themselves to lodge asylum claims
To understand the saga, we must begin with a few numbers.
Ireland is a relatively small country, where a rapidly-growing population of just 5 million (up from 3.5 million in the 1990s) has precipitated a severe housing crisis that means around 15,000 of its citizens are homeless and millions of young people regard property ownership as a pipe dream.
Yet since the start of 2022, it has taken in 105,000 Ukrainian refugees plus almost 35,000 asylum seekers from other countries. These incomers now account for almost three per cent of the population — the equivalent of two million arriving in the UK — and the vast majority are being accommodated, at the Irish taxpayer's expense, in a range of hotels, hostels and other previously empty buildings.
When I visited Ireland last year, a quarter of hotel beds were being used to house refugees and asylum seekers under a scheme now costing more than €2billion per year [£1.7billion]. That's the equivalent of €1,000 [£860] for every Irish household. I found the situation causing severe harm to social cohesion.
It has since got worse. The cost is skyrocketing, too. Of the 84,497 hotel beds 'under Government contract', some 29,000 are in 'tourist' premises, meaning 12 per cent of Ireland's 'tourist bed stock' has been removed from service, costing the wider economy another €1.1 billion [£940 million], according to figures released last year.
All of which brings us back to the Citywest hotel. Walking through its grounds is now a surreal experience. Fountains have been switched off, the helipad is overgrown and the ankle-deep grass covering the greens and fairways of its abandoned golf course are thick with dandelions and other weeds. While piped easy-listening music still plays in reception areas and staff still wear smart blue uniforms, only 95 employees remain from a previous workforce of 383.
In the car park, I bump into Hermann Kelly, president of the Irish Freedom Party, a Eurosceptic outfit on the right of the political spectrum. He's wandering the grounds filming content for social media in the run-up to June's European elections. There's plenty to get his juices flowing.
'This used to be one of the best hotels in Ireland. If you could afford to come here then you'd really arrived. Now people from other countries are being allowed to live here full-time for free and the people are paying,' he says to camera. 'It's madness.'
Kelly seems particularly angered at the sight of luxury cars, including BMWs, Nissan SUVs and one spanking Mercedes, bearing Ukrainian number plates. Working-class Irish taxpayers are, he declares, paying for the three free meals a day that the high-end vehicles' owners are being provided with in its restaurants.
'We are the idiots of the world for allowing this to happen,' he says. 'It's a huge drain on the financial resources and security and has turned Ireland from a high-trust, low-friction society into a low-trust, high-friction one.'
Exhibit A, on this front, are the bus loads of asylum seekers being unloaded outside the convention centre. For these 138 mostly young men, around a third of whom hail from Nigeria, were this week the subject of an intriguing diplomatic row between Ireland and the UK.
Asylum seekers wait to be processed after they were removed from tents outside the International Protection Office
At least 1,700 new arrivals are being forced to sleep rough, with many choosing to stay next door to the building where their application is dealt with after Ireland's government have no accommodation left to offer
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