In 1905, the Irish language activist Patrick Pearse, not yet a revolutionary, bought land in Connemara, in Ireland’s Irish-speaking far West, where he built a thatched cottage in traditional Irish style. Poor and remote, the wind-lashed bogs and rocky hillsides of Connemara were the last refuge for Ireland’s Catholic former landholding class, dispossessed by Cromwell and driven “to hell or Connaught” by the English invader. Ravaged by famine and emigration, its land too poor for commercial exploitation, the wild and remote Atlantic coast represented, for Pearse, as for other adherents of Ireland’s cultural nationalist revival, a repository of Gaelic Irishness from which to draw inspiration.
A few miles from Pearse’s cottage in Ros Muc, in what is now the Connemara Gaeltacht — one of the few and dwindling Irish-speaking regions of the country — the small village of Carna is experiencing its own quiet rebellion against a distant and hostile Dublin administration. With fewer than 180 inhabitants, this isolated village is internationally renowned for the vibrancy of its Irish-speaking vernacular culture, and its tradition of sean-nós singing and elaborate storytelling. Served by a single daily bus from the nearest city of Galway, which takes an hour and a half to wend its way through a dramatic, if desolate landscape of sheer rock jutting from brown bogs and grey Atlantic inlets, Carna’s only hotel has been chosen by the Irish state as a suitable location for an International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) centre for 87 asylum seekers, to local fear and disapproval.
When I arrive in Carna, on a dark and blustery evening, I meet local men and women in hi-vis vests gathered outside the Carna Bay hotel, sharing tea from flasks and sheltering against the bitter, horizontal rain. Since the news was announced last week, locals have monitored incoming traffic for the arrival of their new neighbours, and are mounting a 24-hour vigil in shifts outside the hotel to prevent their arrival. “Who are these people?” asks one elderly woman, back again after mounting guard until 4am that morning. “They’re just unvetted. I just worry because I live alone. They [the Dublin political class] don’t care about us back here, they love to buy their little holiday homes here but that’s it.”
In recent years, and especially following the advent of coalition government rule, to prevent Sinn Féin from entering power in 2020, the Irish state has embarked upon the most dramatic and transformative experiment with demographic change in all Europe. That comes at precisely the same time that the rest of the continent’s political stability is being overturned by popular hostility to mass immigration. Around a fifth of Ireland’s population is now made up of first-generation migrants, an existential change for the country’s identity, undertaken by Dublin with a crusading zeal that seems to defy rational explanation.
At the westernmost edge of Europe, Ireland’s asylum application figures per capita nevertheless outpace “frontline states” such as Italy, while the state grants asylum applications from countries like Nigeria, Pakistan and Algeria routinely rejected by the rest of the EU. While Ireland’s new Taoiseach Micheál Martin recently admitted that 80% of asylum applicants are, in fact, purely economic migrants, the accelerating inward flow and the resulting, sometimes violent protests, have seen the Irish state disperse migrants from Dublin, a now palpably changed city, to towns and villages across the countryside, despite the opposition of the residents. In Lisdoonvarna, in neighbouring County Clare, 93% of residents expressed opposition to an asylum centre in their small town’s single hotel. They were overruled: overnight, the locals became a minority in their own town. Villagers in Carna now fear Dublin has the same in store for them. “The government could be paid off already and that’s why they’re doing it,” one young lad warming himself against a brazier mutters darkly. “There’s not enough here for us as it is.”
Sheltering from the Atlantic rain in a livestock trailer, I speak to Noel Thomas, a rural Galway councillor for Ireland’s anti-immigration Independent Ireland coalition. As we chat, local lads listen, their cigarettes glowing in the dark. “There’s a lot of them coming here that are very different to what we are here in Ireland,” he says. “It’s going to end the same way it has ended in other parts of Europe that we can see. And I mean, why, in the name of God, do we think that we can bring in all these people into this country, and that’s going to work out different? It just doesn’t make sense. And these elected representatives we have like, they’re smart people, so no point saying they’re stupid. They know this themselves, but yet they continue to do it. So what is the agenda at the end of the day? I can’t figure it out, to be honest with you.”
Thomas was active in 2023 protests against an IPAS centre in the nearby village of Rosscahill. When the hotel planned for the site burned down — part of a nationwide wave of arson attacks against proposed asylum centres which the Irish state is struggling to suppress — Garda Special Branch raided his house at night, suspecting him of involvement. “There’s no way they came to my house thinking that I was actually involved in an arson, like,” Thomas tells me. “But at the same time, they’ve been given orders from the top, and they had to go and show their heads, and you can see very clearly that none of them wanted to be there, they looked actually kind of embarrassed to be there. But they just had to carry out their duty there, the commands they were given, but this is the kind of levels that this government is willing to stoop to in this country here.” The youths around murmur their assent. “It’ll end up getting burned down here too, but it won’t be ones from here that’ll have done it,” one lad says. “It’ll be outsiders.”
According to a Garda report recently leaked to the Irish Times, 33 arson attacks took place against planned or rumoured IPAS centres in the year up to August 2024. That’s “significantly more than previously publicly reported”, forcing the government to abandon housing migrants in North Dublin and across swathes of the Western counties of Clare, Kerry, Mayo and Donegal. Protestors against planned or completed IPAS sites in Coolock and Newtownmountkennedy have been active in protests across the Republic, and, more controversially, alongside Loyalists in Northern Ireland. It’s all part of a wave of social media-led anti-immigration activism that has so far failed to leave much of an electoral mark. While Carna, along with the nearby village of Kinvara, has become the latest cause célèbre of Irish anti-immigration activists, the local protestors would prefer their cause to remain peaceable and local-led.
“We’re not shouting, we’re not marching, we don’t have signs, we don’t have any of that,” Meadhbh Ní Ghaora, the 28-year-old organiser of the vigil tells me. “It’s just a local presence, to maybe show the government that we’re not just going to sit here quietly and not do nothing.” In other protest locations, Ní Ghaora observes, outside activists have confronted the police or taken violent action and then returned to their homes, but “it’s those villages then that’s wrecked. We want this hotel to open up again for tourism, and this is why we want to keep it as a local thing. We do not want to be wrecked, and we want people to visit when this hotel is hopefully up and running again as a functioning hotel. We’re a welcoming village, and we want it to stay like that.”
Inside Tig Morain, one of Carna’s two pubs, local men in hi-vis vests nurse their pints, chatting quietly in Irish, as a tabby cat slumbers in the corner. And like Ní Ghaora, they’re keen to keep things peaceful. “We don’t want people stirring shit here, there’s only one road in and out and we’d have the guards [Gardaí] all over us,” the landlord Peter Fitzpatrick tells me. “We have such a small population, and you mix in 80 migrants or 85 migrants, there’s certainly a huge imbalance. So, yeah, people are frightened People are scared.”
“I spoke to three people, and genuinely they’re thinking about selling up, you know, that’s for people that have been born and reared here. There’s huge anger, I mean, you’ve seen the weather we’ve had in the last couple of days, pouring rain, storm, cold, and there’s people out standing on the side of the road, getting wet, with no facilities whatsoever, doing a 24-hour watch, not alone on the hotel but on roads leading into the village, and these are people that are 50s, 60s, 70s, up.”
Carna was a thriving fishing village until EU regulations made the old way of life financially unviable. “
But increasingly restrictive planning regulations mean that young Irish-speaking locals are unable to build homes to stay in the area, throttling the language’s survival at the roots, with the arrival of the migrants threatening both the tourism on which the village economy depends and the age-old way of life. “I suppose the Irish language is on the decline as it is,” Ní Ghaora tells me. “And, you know, bringing people like this in, it doesn’t help it in any way to stay alive. And, like, maybe place names or maybe local words and stuff that would be different in this area, that’s all going to go when people aren’t speaking the Irish you know… you’re asking for the language to almost fade, there.” Again, questions of identity mix with more quotidian concerns. Like others I speak to, Ní Ghaora emphasises she isn’t racist. But with the hotel such an important part of the community, losing it would be a hammerblow to local livelihoods.
“If this goes through, Carna’s finished,” Ann Dowd, owner of Carna’s only bed and breakfast tells me. Until 2022, when it was converted to house Ukrainian refugees for what was initially believed to be a short time, the Carna Bay Hotel was the venue for the rituals of village life, keeping Carna alive as a thriving, tight-knit Irish-language community. While the Ukrainians are well-liked, villagers now want their community centre back, and life to return to its old familiar texture. “You have christenings, you have funerals, everything afterwards happens in the hotel, and we haven’t had that now for three years.”
“I just wonder, what are the government, our Irish government, getting out of all this?” Dowd asks me. “And I just feel they have to be getting something because they’re just putting them anywhere. Because, I mean, the government seems to be just, oh, bring everybody into this country, give them everything. But our young people, they find it impossible to get planning. The government doesn’t seem to want to help them at all, and the rents are so expensive, and the young ones that want to build, they won’t help them at all. It’s the younger people that are really watching now what’s happening. They have young kids, and they’re just thinking and wonder, because when this starts, if this happens, this is going to be it, it’ll forever be like other countries, you know.”
“With the hotel such an important part of the community, losing it would be a hammerblow to local livelihoods.”
Walking to the hotel, I overhear a local woman say “We should come up with a plan for if the Guards are escorting the bus.” Seeing me approach, the women switched to Irish, turning their backs to me, refusing to talk to me or let me photograph their vigil. The mood seemed sullen, suspicious.
In his lonely cottage near Carna, a year before the Easter Rising that gave birth to the modern Irish state, Pearse wrote his famous funeral oration for the Fenian revolutionary Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, in which he railed against the British administration in Dublin who “think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half” and pledged his love for “all that was olden and beautiful and Gaelic in Ireland”, in the service of a nation that would be “not free merely, but Gaelic as well”. Yet a century after independence, it is the Dublin government that now seems increasingly distant and hostile to Connemara’s Irish-speaking culture and way of life. “They’re oblivious to the area, or they don’t give a damn, or they’re just saying ‘To hell with the West,’ you know?” Fitzpatrick tells me. “To hell with the West.”
