![]() The Abbeyfield Hotel closed its doors in 2010, a victim of the recession, after just a handful of years in operation. In declaring that Ballaghaderreen would be the site of a new centre, the Department of Justice gave local representatives mere hours’ notice before the announcement hit the front pages nationally. Love for the Department of Justice is in scant supply however. Many of that centre’s former residents (it closed nine years ago) still live locally.Ī welcome for the refugees is a given. What’s more, the town has already been the site of a (now defunct) Direct Provision centre. There are very substantial populations of eastern European citizens and Pakistanis (many of whom worked in the Halal Meats factory which closed 10 years ago and stayed on thereafter) in the town. While no guarantees have been made that employment will be sourced locally, Junior Minister for Justice David Stanton has assured stakeholders that every effort would be made to do so.Ĭathedral of the Assumption and St Nathy, Ballaghaderreenīut employment, or resentment of newcomers, doesn’t really appear to be a problem.īallaghaderreen is already about as diverse a western Irish town as you could think of. The new centre, to be developed in the confines of the disused four-star Abbeyfield Hotel, will require staffing – maintenance, cleaning etc. The arrival of refugees to the town should, in theory, help that figure. It’s one of the major bones of contention in the community,” he says. When asked about unemployment, Gavigan visibly flinches. Knock Airport is just 10 minutes away, but employs “a handful of people from the town at most”, according to Fr Joe Gavigan, the parish priest. The major employers include Aurivo (an agri-food plant with about 70 employees), an ECMI cigar factory, a bacon factory and a library and offices at the Dillon House complex in the town.Īside from that, many residents commute to nearby towns (Boyle, Castlebar, Carrick-on-Shannon) for work. The town has the Celtic Tiger to thank for that. There are also almost 300 vacant houses sitting idle. Although there are at least eight pubs and numerous clothes stores, boarded-up or derelict businesses are ten-a-penny. Still, jobs are certainly hard to come by in the town. Its unemployment rate of 32.4% in 2011 (as of that year’s Census, the most recently available data) was nearly twice the then national average. The town, objectively, is not a well-off one. The town is really two streets (one long, one slightly shorter) intersecting with each other in a manner that will be familiar to any who have travelled through the west of Ireland. There are also worries that the town’s infrastructure is simply not capable of supplying the services that the new arrivals will certainly need.īallaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, has a population of just shy of 2,000. However, there remains a certain discontent with how the news was disseminated. The reaction of the community has been heartening to independent observers. It's closed off however /m9NK8FIHhT- Cianan Brennan JanuCianan Brennan / Twitter Abbeyfield Hotel is placed right on town outskirts. In #ballaghaderreen to report on incoming refugee situation. Apart from this, there are few concrete details. The first refugees are now expected towards the end of February or the start of March. Officially, the DOJ explained that the situation is an emergency, and word was given as soon as was reasonably practicable.Īs things stand, relatively few details have emerged as to how the process is actually going to work. Less than 24 hours notice was given to the town’s representatives prior to the announcement. The orientation process is to last for six months in Roscommon before the new arrivals are integrated elsewhere around the country. There will be at least 80 people as part of the first tranche of arrivals, most of them children, most of them Syrian, with that number probably rising to 240 (though not all remaining at the same time). The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) announcement that an Emergency Reception and Orientation Centre (EROC) for refugees is to be established in the town garnered national headlines and unleashed something of a media storm in the area. ![]() ![]() THE SMALL WESTERN town of Ballaghaderreen has been shunted front and centre in the last week, into a limelight it isn’t particularly comfortable with. ![]()
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