When my parents used to take us back home to spend our summer holidays in County Leitrim, it was for us an idyllic time of immersion in a place and culture that the modern age had yet to touch. The slow-paced but hard-working rural economy of my grandparents’ time knew little of the anxieties and fears that beset Ireland today, except perhaps the fear of poverty.

My grandparents are long gone now, and the cottage that was the heart of reunion for generations is slowly but surely crumbling back into the bog. Once green fields and the busy organisation of hayricks and harvesting have lapsed back to a damp and depressing wilderness of unloved fields and abandoned machinery.

The roots of this demise are understandable. For centuries the west of Ireland has been a place of leaving, as the desperately marginal and difficult task of gouging a living out of the unforgiving land persuaded so many young people to seek a better life elsewhere. Even those who stayed gradually drifted from agricultural work to the services sector, and old family farmsteads were progressively replaced with new bungalows and suburban housing developments.

Along with this painful but unstoppable metaphysical migration of identity came a rejection of the numerous edifices that were perceived to have been responsible for the restrictions and limitations of the past. Primary amongst these was the Catholic Church, which had for several centuries increasingly controlled and confined every aspect of Irish life in ways that were – in many respects – badly at odds with a Christian foundation.

Just as much of Western society has journeyed over the past half century away from subservience and conformity, Ireland too had emerged from its own particular past into a new world order where very few things are certain, and an unflinching belief in God and Christian morality has been replaced by a submission to pretty much whatever the wind blows in on the day.

Whilst there may have been rational and understandable reasons for much of Ireland rejecting its more recent Catholic past, the moral vacuum that has been left by the abandonment of the faith in the general populace is presenting new and confounding challenges to a nation whose psyche is grounded in hospitality, tolerance and positivism.

Nowhere has this become more apparent than in the dichotomy currently raging over immigration, as Ireland struggles to rationalise the consequences of welcoming the strangers found on its doorstep. On a recent visit to Dublin I was shocked to see that a vigorously pro-European, ‘inclusive’ nation is fast becoming a deeply divided country, with a rising political Right that is reviving symbols of nationalism – and even Catholicism – to enflame prejudice against incomers. It was disturbing and unpleasant to see instances where even the Rosary is becoming weaponised as a political symbol of national purity – which is particularly ironic and depressing given that the Rosary is such a universal symbol of unity, love and tolerance.

Much of the civil unrest and public protest that has been seen recently in and around Dublin, and that is now starting to spread elsewhere in Ireland, is not so much an issue with public attitudes, but with the utter ineptitude of the Irish government to handle and explain the process of welcoming refugees and asylum seekers into Ireland.

The UK’s policy of ‘stop the boats’, frustrating and delaying claims and generally preventing people from getting into Britain at all may be reprehensible, but at least it meets the criteria of a strategy – with which you can either agree or disagree. In Ireland there just seemed to have been just a vague and blindly optimistic hope that the doors should be thrown open, and the good nature of the population and its ability to sort its own affairs would ensure that everything will be alright in the end. Someone really should have guessed that in the modern world things probably weren’t going to work out like that at all.

Here in the UK there are desperate discussions going on about how to disperse refugees and asylum-seekers into countryside in order to hopefully somehow dilute the issue in the public’s mind – numerous hotels have been commissioned, army bases and holiday camps explored and just about any redundant space considered.

Onto the back of this have jumped the speculators, and a complex web of profit and exploitation that makes converting a building to house refugees extremely lucrative – property owners can receive grants for building works, a very generous annual allowance for each room occupant, and local councils are obligated to re-home occupants within three to five years, after which the owner can return the property to other uses, or sell it off.

With tourism struggling due to the economic climate, is it any surprise that owners of hotels and the like have spotted that turning a building over temporarily to house refugees is currently a far more lucrative prospect than chasing holiday guests?

Such has been the case in my family’s home village of Dromahair – a sleepy, single street community of 808 souls, with a shop, a pub and a high street hotel that has for the past century been the centre of the village’s cultural life. – hosting weddings, socials, funerals, concerts and all manner of community events.

It might have seemed like little could disturb the life of this close-knit community, that was until the owners of the Abbey Manor Hotel announced they were submitting a change of use planning application to convert the building to house 150 single male refugees. The hotel – which is a Victorian listed building  – had actually been lying vacant for 13 years before being bought by a Dublin based company which had been set up in late 2021. The company’s director is also director of 17 other companies believed to be engaged in similar ventures. Initially there were promises to restore the old Abbey Hotel to its former glory, but it quickly became apparent that no such work was ever going to take place – and then the change of use to asylum accommodation surfaced.

It’s a story that has been replicated across the UK, and is now becoming increasingly common across Ireland, with serial entrepreneurs sweeping up many hundreds of properties to make profits from housing refuges and asylum-seekers, only later to benefit even further from the reordering and sale of their extensive property portfolios. From a government’s perspective, this is not only sound capitalism in action but has significant fiscal benefits – and very conveniently helps to diffuse negative publicity about government fallings in dealing with migrants.

The end of this conveyor belt – which I think ought to be termed ‘fiscal trafficking’ – sees local councils under a punitive obligation to take residents of local converted buildings and absorb them into the community. So councils are not only under pressure to find accommodation, but also to ensure the community has all the necessary infrastructure – doctors, dentists, schools, employers and the like – to deal with an increased number of citizens.

Over in Dromahair, adding 150 single unemployed males with multiple support needs into a mixed community with scant public services, a single bus route and very limited opportunities for employment is going to be challenging to say the least. Little surprise then that large groups of Dromahair residents have been protesting outside the hotel in recent months, and only yesterday the local council and the developer were in the High Court in Dublin slugging it out over whether or not the property should be granted a change of use from tourist hotel to temporary housing for asylum seekers.

Whilst the uproar in Dromahair may not capture more than a few regional headlines west of Dublin, the encounter is one that will become increasingly common across both Ireland and the UK, as temporary accommodation for asylum seekers becomes unworkable and more permanent and equitable arrangements will need to be found for those seeking refuge on our shores.

Any proposal to convert a prominent local landmark into an accommodation centre will inevitably enflame local reactions, and with that the potential to awaken dangerous undercurrents of manufactured nationalism and far right ideologies. Meanwhile, key community structures often remain disused and deteriorating, sometimes to the point where demolition is the only option when the distant speculators have finally fled – and the community is left a little poorer as a consequence. Alternatively, the relentless drift towards converting key community structures to homes of multiple occupation (HMOs), or even councils building new ones, is only tenable if other critical community infrastructures are in place, which they rarely are in these economically depressed times.

In Ireland in just a few weeks time there will be two referenda aimed at changing Ireland’s constitution regarding gender and family. To be held on 8th March – International Women’s Day – the two key wording changes come as part of the ongoing push in Ireland to move a way from the country’s Catholic and Christian roots towards the new secular gods of inclusivity and equality for all.

The General Scheme of the Thirty-Ninth Amendment of the Constitution Bill (the Family amendment) proposes to insert the words “whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships”.

The current protection afforded to families under the constitution only extends to married families and these proposals are intended to extend this constitutional right to other lasting relationships and put them on an equal footing with married families.

Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar has said that the amendments will “reinforce the fact that Ireland is a modern, inclusive nation that strives to treat and care for all its people equally.”

Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman has added: “This referendum will offer another opportunity to move away from the Ireland of 1937 to continue that journey to becoming a kinder, a more inclusive society and one that acknowledges and respects the needs of all citizens.”

It’s no bad thing that the Constitution moves beyond its current notion that the “woman’s place is in the home”, and also seeks to acknowledge that other forms of relationships – such as single parents or families headed by a grandparent – should also be protected legally by the state, but one can’t help but feel that much of drive towards implementing these changes is driven by secular political and moral ideologies, rather than any profound concerns for the nature of family, human equality and the needs of “all citizens” – which presumably ought to include refugees.

Little wonder then that many Irish politicians are trying desperately to focus the nation’s attention on the coming referenda rather than the growing social unrest in the country over its negligent handling of the migration and housing crisis.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian