On a cold January afternoon in Roscrea, a market town of around 5,500 people in rural Ireland, news began to spread that the town’s only remaining hotel would close temporarily — to provide housing for 160 asylum seekers.
Almost immediately, speculation and anger began to swirl online.
Posts to a local Facebook group blamed the closure on the government and on “non-nationals” moving in. Someone called for people to gather outside the hotel, Racket Hall, to demand answers.
That night, dozens of people showed up for an improvised protest that has divided the town and become a monthslong symbol of growing anti-immigration sentiment across Ireland. A small group of locals have kept a constant presence in the hotel parking lot since then, using a tent as protection from the rain and a metal drum as a firepit.
Similar demonstrations have sprung up in pockets across Ireland over the past year, fueled by nativist rhetoric online, a housing shortage and a cost-of-living crisis. Occasionally, they have erupted in violence: There was a riot in Dublin last year, and a series of arson attacks have targeted accommodations intended for asylum seekers.
While the Roscrea protest has been small and mostly peaceful, it echoes a well-defined playbook. “It’s not like this is all centrally planned,” said Mark Malone, a researcher at the Hope and Courage Collective, which monitors the far right in Ireland. “But there becomes a kind of repertoire of tactics that people replicate because they see it happening elsewhere.”
Roscrea grew up around a seventh-century monastery in a valley in County Tipperary, and its population peaked before the 1840s famine and dwindled over the next 150 years. Its sleepy streets are lined with a few pubs and shops, while on the fringes, roads are dotted with abandoned buildings and derelict houses. Nearly 73 percent of the dwindling population identified as “white Irish” in the most recent census.
It’s a place people have long emigrated from. By 2020, a community study recorded a lack of investment, poor job opportunities and “a general sense that the town has been forgotten about.”
For some locals, the hotel closure felt like the last straw. “Some people in Roscrea already feel like we’re not being served well by the government, and then the government wants to come down and plant people in our town,” said Justin Phelan, 34, one of the demonstrators.
The protesters harbor various grievances — like worries about housing and jobs, and fears that the local population is being “replaced.” The uniting theme is a sense that their hardships are linked to immigrants.
On Jan. 15, when the first asylum seekers were set to move in, around 60 protesters tried to halt their arrival. Footage posted online showed a scuffle and protesters yelling at the police, there to ensure the immigrants’ safety. As some locals shouted “Ireland is full” and “We don’t have room,” 17 people, including children, were led into the hotel.
By mid-February, a dozen protesters were still milling about the site under banners declaring “Ireland Is Full” and “Justice for Roscrea People.” Each morning, someone made breakfast in a van hooked up to a generator. Cups of tea flowed freely.
“You cannot keep putting people into a town where there is nothing for the people who are already in it,” said Marie-Claire Doran, 42. “Everybody has a limit, and every town has a limit. So that was why I came here.”
Those around her nodded in approval. Some described asylum seekers in loaded and alarmist terms. “They are in every possible nook and cranny that you can find,” Mr. Phelan’s sister Maria Phelan, 31, said.
Many protesters said, incorrectly, that Irish people in town were being outnumbered by newcomers. In fact, Roscrea had only 321 asylum seekers, as well as 153 Ukrainians (there under a separate, temporary Europe-wide program) by the end of January, according to government data.
The government has not disclosed the nationalities of the asylum seekers in Roscrea; across Ireland, the five most common origin countries were Nigeria, Georgia, Algeria, Afghanistan and Somalia, according to government data.
Ireland is experiencing a stark housing shortage caused by successive governments failing to invest in affordable housing and by the cascading effects of the 2008 financial crisis. This, along with frustration about the perceived lack of resources locally, has contributed to anger and resentment that is often misdirected at newcomers, experts say.
And while asylum seekers make up a small portion of immigrants to Ireland — 13,000 in 2023 — they are often the focus of hostility because the government has a legal obligation to ensure they are housed.
Asylum applications have increased in Europe against a backdrop of rising global conflict, after dipping during the height of the pandemic in 2020. Ireland is currently housing around 27,000 asylum seekers, according to government data, compared with fewer than 7,000 annually during the two decades before 2020.
The arrival of more than 100,000 Ukrainian refugees since 2022 has added to the pressure on housing. While most are in Dublin and other cities, the government has increasingly been forced to look to smaller towns and villages, too.
“It’s a perfect storm,” said Nick Henderson, the chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council, a charity, given what he and others say is the government’s failure to explain its plans or manage people’s concerns. (The government denies that lack of communication.) But, he added, in some communities there had been little opposition to the refugees.
Despite the noisy protests, many in Roscrea were welcoming too. On a recent morning, Margo O’Donnell-Roche, a community worker with the nonprofit North Tipperary Development Company, took fruit into a hall for a weekly meeting intended to build connections between Roscrea residents and newcomers.
“People feel that intimidation,” Ms. O’Donnell-Roche said of the asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees she works with. “People were messaging me saying: ‘What’s going on? Is this about me?’”
Irish people who immigrated to Britain, the United States and Australia historically faced hostility, she noted, and many locals empathize with the hardship that refugees face now.
At one end of the hall, two Ukrainian women in their 70s hit a table-tennis ball back and forth, laughing as they said they had not played since they were girls. In the next room, three men from Nigeria played snooker, a type of pool, with a man from Pakistan and another from Ukraine. A group of Ukrainian women at a table sang patriotic songs while two Irish women listened intently.
Savelii Kirov, 37, who fled Ukraine with his wife, said he found most locals welcoming. But he had seen a Facebook page where people had discussed the hotel closure. “Some people wrote incorrect information,” he said. “And that’s hard to see.”
Margaret Ryan, 72, a volunteer, who lives near a convent where Ukrainian families have been housed said their arrival brought life back into the once-empty place. “We watched pigeons go in and out of that building for 20 years,” Ms. Ryan said. “Now it’s a beautiful lit-up building at nighttime. It’s alive again.”
She did not necessarily blame those who protested the asylum seekers’ arrival. But “they haven’t met these people or heard their stories,” she said with a pause. “If they only knew.”
The group outside Racket Hall said they planned to stay until the government committed to a cap on asylum seekers. Many described a sense of camaraderie that kept them coming back. One man said it was the only thing that had gotten him out of his house consistently since his wife’s death.
They vehemently denied they were xenophobic or racist. But far-right activists from across Ireland have traveled to Racket Hall and posted livestreams since the protest began.
On Feb. 5, a group from Roscrea joined an anti-immigration rally in Dublin, carrying a sign that read, “It could be your town next.” The event was organized under the rallying cry “Ireland Is Full,” a phrase coined by a far-right Irish activist years ago that has spread online and has been amplified by far-right influencers in the United States and Europe.
As language like this is used more, it inevitably seeps into attitudes and behavior, said Mr. Malone, the researcher. “Where you see a rise in violent rhetoric online, it inevitably plays out in the streets,” he said.
