It was during an otherwise run of the mill weekday in April when I first went to report on a protest in a village a mere ten minutes drive from my home.
To me at the time, to be honest, Newtownmountkennedy was somewhere of little consequence. The village consists largely of a few cafes, a charming Catholic church where a now 91-year-old priest says Mass, a very well run charity shop, and a small Dunnes Stores.
It’s the last stop on the local bus that serves my area, in other words it’s the last place on earth I would ever have expected to encounter the Garda riot squad (POU).
Despite how small and unequipped the village is, the government decided to take over a disused site, once run by the HSE, for the purpose of housing single male asylum seekers – a move which has thus far cost you approximately €4.2 million.
Many of the villagers rejected this notion, but were told indirectly by then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that they didn’t have a “veto” on who lives among them. The rest, as they say, is history.
Or rather, the state might like it very much if what happened next was confined to history, as its actions towards the people of Newtownmountkennedy, and the shocking waste of taxpayers’ money, are reprehensible in the extreme.
On the 25th of April 2024, men and women of various ages were pepper sprayed, baton charged, and run off the narrow country road with some even being chased into nearby estates by officers with shields and helmets.
Some of those gathered threw stones off the road, bottles, and other seemingly random objects at the POU in the midst of the disorder. It was something I never thought I’d see in that sleepy little place.
Protestors had gathered at the site while hopefully anticipating the results of a promised meeting with those behind the IPAS project only to witness heavy machinery being moved onto the grounds as the plans pushed ahead in spite of their objections.
Over the weeks that led up to that night various efforts had been made to halt the opening of the site including attempts to establish its ownership, calls for local councillors and TDs to intervene, and just about every other avenue of civil resistance, all to no avail.
The entirely avoidable chaos that ensued that evening has been well documented on this platform.
People felt ignored and belittled by the state’s actions. Imagine how they feel now knowing that it was all for nothing.
After all the controversy and upset, the state has finally agreed with the people of the village that the site is unsuitable for an IPAS centre.
The message of the protest was that the site was unsuitable to house large numbers of people, be they single men or not, but the state ploughed on ahead anyway, putting military style camps on the land surrounding the house, while largely foreign security guards wearing balaclaves and Gardaí kept watch.
The site, River Lodge, will now be returned to the HSE, something that campaigner and unsuccessful local election candidate, John Larkin had called for all along.
Sinn Féin TD, John Brady has tried to take credit for exposing the waste of money in using the site saying, “This belated move has only come about because of the pressure I applied and the spotlight I put on this issue after exposing the extraordinary level of public money that was being squandered at this site,” he says.
That’s all well and good, but I don’t remember one single Sinn Féin councillor or TD standing up for the people of the village when they were crying out for help. Former Sinn Féin, now Independent councillor, John Snell stood with the people. To the best of my knowledge, Brady et al never showed their faces.
Having spent €2.8 million of tax payers money on developing the site into an IPAS centre in 2024, the state has now proven that the people of Newtownmountkennedy were correct all along.
So the men, women, and even children who kept vigil outside the site for many quiet weeks before the trouble erupted weren’t “racist” or “far-right”, they were just right.
We now know that €1.4m was spent on the site in 2025, of which €1.3m was spent on security alone because the asylum seekers weren’t there.
In lay man’s terms that’s €4,200,000 of your money flushed down the toilet for nothing.
In all, it seems as though the men were only housed at the site for a mere seven months.
After the asylum seekers were moved into the ‘luxury’ tents in the middle of an often flooded field in May 2024, around the beginning of last year, I started to hear that they were gone.
You may remember in November of 2024 reports emerged that the men had been moved off the site because of poor weather conditions, well it seems like they were never moved back.
The state often places great emphasis on the value of various ‘communities’ when lecturing us about the importance of accepting large scale immigration, however it seems not to view Irish communities with any great level of esteem.
For the privilege of all of the above, the people of Newtownmountkennedy were bullied and castigated by a state that couldn’t give a toss about their community.
Of the hundreds present over the course of the protests – which went on for weeks on end without incident – four people were arrested and charged with violent disorder after the POU came to town on the 25th of April 2024.
Since then three more men, two of whom are in their sixties, have also been charged in relation to protesting at the site, with all seven facing trial at Circuit Court level this spring sitting in Drogheda.