A hotel earmarked to house 70 asylum seekers has been destroyed in a suspicious fire in rural Ireland, only weeks after the Irish capital was rocked by major anti-immigrant riots.
The blaze destroyed much of the large, disused hotel in Rosscahill, a remote village in County Galway, late on Saturday night. Police investigating the incident said nobody was inside the building at the time of the fire, which is being treated as suspected criminal damage.
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It followed days of angry protests outside the hotel, intended to halt work on preparing the site for the arrival of asylum seekers.
The suspected arson incident is the latest in a string of recent attacks targeting housing intended for asylum across Ireland, amid a wave of xenophobic agitation linking immigration and crime.
READ: Anti-migrant rioters rampage through Dublin after knife attack on children
On Monday, Irish Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman described the fire as a criminal act intended to intimidate foreigners seeking asylum in Ireland.
“What we saw in Galway was deeply sinister,” Mr O’Gorman said on public broadcaster RTÉ Radio. “I think people who use the international protection process have a right to be safely accommodated while their application is being adjudicated on.”
Earlier he had called on politicians “across the board” to “condemn this disgraceful act and the fear mongering that led to it.”
In the days leading up to the fire, protesters had staged an attempted blockade of the hotel grounds, blocking the entrance and lighting fires in steel drums, following the news that the Department for Integration had signed a year-long contract for 70 migrants to be accommodated at the site.
O’Gorman’s condemnation was echoed by other politicians, including Justice Minister Helen McEntee, who said the suspected arson did “not represent the values of Irish people.” Sinn Féin housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin said: “This is not who we are as a people. We must not tolerate this hatred.”
But a local councillor for conservative party Fianna Fáil, Noel Thomas, who attended the protest outside the hotel, told Irish media he blamed the government for the unrest, saying the intended placement of such a large number of asylum seekers in the village had caused huge distress in the community.
“A lot of the blame needs to be laid in the lap of the government. As long as they deal with it [immigration] the way they are dealing with it, there will be more of this,” he said, calling for asylum seekers to be banned from the country.
“The inn is full,” he told RTÉ Radio.
The fire is only the latest attack targeting asylum seeker accommodation, amid roiling anti-immigration unrest.
Last month, at least two accommodation centres for asylum seekers were targeted amid anti-migrant riots in Dublin, described by police as the worst rioting in modern Irish history.
The unrest spiralled out of control as far-right agitators whipped up mobs in response to a horrific stabbing in the city centre, in which a man knifed a group of children outside a school and a care assistant who tried to defend them.
The fact that the chief suspect was an Algerian-born naturalised Irish citizen immediately drew the attention of far-right networks who have been campaigning heavily over immigration and crime, including the sentencing in recent months of a Slovak national for the 2022 murder of teacher Ashling Murphy, and in October of an Iraqi-born man for the homophobic murders of two men in April 2022.
One of the buildings attacked with a petrol bomb amid the Dublin riot had previously been targeted by anti-migrant protests earlier in the year. Days layer, a hotel in Rosslare, Country Wexford, was targeted in an arson attack as it carried out works to prepare for the arrival of asylum seekers. Other attacks were recorded at asylum seeker accommodation across the country in January, May, July and August, the Irish Times reported.
Observers like Mark Malone have been watching with alarm the rise of anti-immigration rhetoric which has fueled the wave of attacks, spreading from far-right chat groups to street protests and now finding support from elected officials.
“Xenophobic online hate groups and far-right influencers have been very active in pushing support for the tactics, including the use of arson, of those involved in stopping the use of Ross Lake hotel for emergency accommodation,” Malone, an organiser with the Hope and Courage Collective, an anti-extremism civil society group, told VICE News.
“To hear phrases like ‘unvetted males’ and ‘men of fighting age’ popularised by the darkest fringes of the internet being used on the national airwaves is a sign that some local politicians in mainstream parties seem happy to be playing with fire.”
