Ezra Levant visits Dundrum, Ireland, where the historic Dundrum House Hotel—a beloved 500-bed community hub since 1978—was sold to American investor Jeff Leo, then repurposed by the Irish government to house International Protection Applicants (IPAs) despite local protests. Residents like Fiona Kennedy fear 2,700+ asylum seekers could overwhelm services, disrupting Dundrum’s economy and culture, while questioning how undocumented arrivals bypass existing laws amid Ireland’s housing crisis. Legal challenges and political backlash, including accusations of racism, fail to address the core issue: a top-down decision ignoring community history and needs, leaving locals fighting for their town’s future. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the most extreme immigration story you've ever heard.
It's July 18th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
I am in the heart of Ireland, about two hours south of Dublin.
Behind me, if you can see it, is a mighty castle, later converted into a church.
It's called the Rock of Cashel.
And for centuries, it was the seat of the Irish kings.
We're living in a land of history, of culture, of religion, of language.
The Irish Indigenous people go back to time immemorial.
And most of Ireland still lives in that way.
Dublin is a modern metropolitan city, but in the small town of Dundrum, which is in the county called Tipperary, well, there's about 175, 200 people who live there.
And although they're modern, progressive, fully high-tech Irish like anyone else, it's a small community where everyone knows each other.
And in some ways, it's how Ireland, I expect, has been for centuries.
It's a small place, but there is a local community center, namely the hotel, which now also has a golf course and a country club.
It's a place where locals would go for meals to play golf.
It was a meeting place for the community.
Many weddings were held there.
The hub of the community and a source of economic opportunity for the community, making tourism part of the local economy.
But then the hotel was sold to an American investor.
And then the Irish government came with a massive contract for this American investor, offering him untold millions of dollars if he were to transform this hotel, which itself is over 100 years old, into a refugee camp.
I say again, this four-star hotel with a gorgeous, immaculate golf course being transformed in the heart of Celtic Ireland into a refugee camp is astonishing.
Now, by the way, there have been some Ukrainian families living there, and the folks in the local community tell me they're actually fairly well integrated.
They're not a threat or a danger.
The kids are going into the local schools, and it's manageable.
But we're told that those Ukrainians are being evicted and that the hotel, which currently has a certain number of Ukrainians, is going to massively increase the numbers of beds available.
One of the numbers that has been reported in the mainstream press is to 280 people.
This in a town that doesn't even have 200 people.
But what we learned today is that the capacity of the hotel is in fact closer to 500 people and that under Irish law, every one of those 500 could apply to bring in five other family members.
In other words, there could be a doorway for 3,000 refugee migrants or IPAs as they're called in Ireland to come and stay in that once central communal Irish place of the Dundrum Hotel.
We came down here, first of all, because we couldn't believe it.
Second of all, we wanted to get the facts.
Now, I've written an email to the owner of the hotel asking him questions about everything from the terms of his contract and why it's secret and why there's been no consultation whatsoever with the community to details about how many migrants will come and from where and for how long do they expect to be hold up in the hotel.
I haven't heard back yet, but if I do, I'll let you know.
It's astonishing to me that in any place in Ireland, if you seek to build a building, dig a mine, open a business, almost anything you seek to do, there is a planning process where other affected people get to feed back what their impact will be.
You can't just build an office tower in the middle of nowhere.
What about the traffic?
What about the parking?
What about the noise?
Can you build something too close to a school?
These are the questions that are dealt with by municipalities all the time with zoning laws and public hearings.
That's the meat and potatoes work of any town council really in the world.
But this decision to turn this local hotel into a refugee camp is not made locally.
It's a national decision and it is being imposed on the local community.
I asked repeatedly the protesters about town hall meetings or information sessions.
They say that there have been none.
There is no political process and there is no legal process open to them to ask questions and get information, let alone challenge and feedback.
There is no back and forth.
There is no debate.
It is being opposed in an authoritarian manner from the top down.
That's bad enough when it's in a larger city like Dublin, where we were in the neighborhood of Kulak and police charged protesters and pepper sprayed them and there was altercation and some of the young kids threw rocks.
It's bad enough in a large city like that.
But if this plan goes ahead and if Little Dundrum, a town of 200, now has hundreds and potentially thousands of foreign migrants, it's no longer Dundrum.
And I wonder what the people who lived so proudly in that fortress behind us, that seat of kings for centuries, what they would say.
They fought off invaders.
They fought to impose a rule of law on this land, to create a nation.
And for centuries it existed.
But now the same Irish, the indigenous people, are being, I don't know what the word is.
Invaded is the wrong word because that implies that the government in Ireland is resisting it.
What do you call it when a town of 200 people has 280 people of a foreign nation added to it?
The rumors are that they would be from Somalia or Nigeria, but we don't know where they would be from.
When I was in Dublin a few months ago and I went asking migrants where they were from, they told me answers like Pakistan and Palestine.
They were all single military aged men.
Will it be military aged men?
Will it be families?
The local community has not been told.
It's astonishing to me that in a country that calls itself a democracy, they don't have the information, let alone the democratic right to challenge that information, to use that information, to have their say.
Over the course of the next half hour, you can see what I saw in Dundrum.
We'll talk to one of the local mothers who has become a spokesman in the fight back against this plan.
We'll talk to someone whose family built up the hotel in the 70s and 80s and is heartbroken to see what's become of it.
And we'll show you briefly the American owner of the hotel speeding in his BMW.
I waved at him.
He waved as he ran in.
I wrote to him asking for an interview.
Why would he give me an interview?
He doesn't give interviews even to his own townspeople.
By the way, one of my questions to the owner was, does he even live in the village himself?
I'm here in Ireland because I find their immigration policy absolutely astonishing.
And that's news in itself, what's going on in a fellow democracy.
But it's also a warning of how things can go in any country that puts the globalist ideology of mass migration over the sovereign decisions of local citizens.
These citizens I spoke to, some of them in tears, have no rights whatsoever.
We heard about Irish homeless not having a place to stay, Irish homeless, Irish people living below the poverty line.
Imagine bringing people from Somalia to the front of the line, putting them in a four-star hotel and telling the local people they have no say in it.
Here's the rest of our program in Dundrum, Tipperary, Ireland.
Fiona, I'm Ezra Levant from Rebel News.
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
My name is Fiona Kennedy.
I'm a very ordinary mother.
I live here locally in Dundrum, and I'm here with a group of people.
We're the most ordinary people that you could possibly meet.
We find ourselves in an extraordinary situation.
And really, we're standing to protect our hotel, our beautiful hotel here, Dundrum House Hotel, our golf club, and our community.
Now, I had never heard of Dundrum until yesterday.
I looked it up and it only has about 200 people.
And I understand that this facility, this gorgeous, beautiful hotel and country club, could theoretically sleep up to 500 people.
What do you know about the contract that the owner of this facility has to house asylum seekers and refugees?
What information do you have?
Well, unfortunately, we have very little information.
Now, we have submitted a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.
I'm not sure if the time on that is up, but we've had no information back yet.
We would like to get sight of the contract, but nobody's forthcoming on that.
And have you had, has the owner of the hotel been communicative at all?
Not in the slightest.
No, he hasn't engaged with us at all.
And what is the government entity that's involved?
Is it just the national government or are there any local governments involved?
Well, really, this has been driven by national government, the Department of Integration.
And we do have local government here in Tipperary in Ireland as well.
We have some local councillors who are working on our behalf, working with us.
We have one local tipperary TD member of our parliament, just to translate it to Canadian.
And here is actually the owner is just about to pass.
The owner is just passing you.
I'll have to go and talk to him.
What's his name?
His name is Jeff, Jeff Leo.
Elected Independent Struggles00:08:13
And I understand he's from away, is that right?
Yeah, I understand he's American.
I've actually never met Jeff.
So that's my first time seeing him.
That hasn't been a photograph.
He certainly sped by.
Yeah, that has been that.
He hasn't had any community town halls.
He hasn't sat, has he sat down with the media at all?
Not to my knowledge.
He hasn't.
I'm guessing you would know.
We would know.
And he hasn't engaged with the community at all.
At two public meetings, both very heavily attended.
And did he send anyone to those?
No, he didn't.
I find that astonishing.
Yeah, he was invited.
How was he invited?
By email, by letter, not sure, because I wasn't involved.
He must have known about it.
I mean he's, he's the center of this whole project 100.
He knew about it, you know, but he, he didn't come.
But yeah, the only time we see him actually is when he is speeding in or out of the gates.
Yeah, he certainly came by quite quickly.
So right now in in this facility, I understand, in fact I saw with my own eyes there are some Ukrainians.
Can you tell me about who's here now?
The exact numbers we're not sure of.
Uh, there was an initial contract um in place to house, we understand, in the region of 270 Ukrainians and those people, they were welcomed into the village with open arms, men and women and kids, like were they families or they were they just military age men?
No, there were fat, there were family groups and they were welcomed into the, into the area and the children are going to school locally.
Uh, people are working in the community and uh, they are very supportive of what we are trying to do here.
They now are being um.
I I mentioned the the, the contract.
It was a temporary accommodation um contract that was entered into to house Ukrainians who were fleeing from war and um.
But that situation, that was fine because that was always going to be a temporary arrangement.
But now we have a situation where uh, there's going to be a rolling contract to provide accommodation for IPAS.
I heard that the Ukrainians are being evicted.
Is that true?
Yeah, we understand that.
They have been told um that they uh need to be out.
The information we were given is by the second week in august.
Now we can't, we can't um speak to the the, the accuracy of any of those reports, because we're sceptical of everything we hear, because we don't know if, if somebody's saying oh to give us a false sense of security that nothing is going to happen here until the second week in august.
We are behaving every day as if an arrival of IPAS is imminent.
Ipa is what you call a protection applicant.
We would call that refugee claimants.
In can yeah well well, here the, the um, here the uh Ukrainians would be deemed refugees in that they were fleeing a war situation in their country um, but the asylum seekers it's a.
It's a different this.
That's where they fall under under uh, international protection applicants.
Now, where would the proposed ipas or asylum seekers, where would they be coming from?
Look, we don't know, because we we don't know anything, we're not being told anything.
We're hearing, of course, reports from different parts of the country um, about they're coming from here there, everywhere.
We don't really want to speak to that because we don't know.
And I just want to be really really clear, for us, this is not a race issue at all.
For us this is a services issue.
You mentioned there the um, the population of Dundrum.
In the last census, I understand the population of the village is 221 people.
There's a bed capacity inside these gates for in around 550 people and that alone doubles the population of of the village.
And if you take into account the fact that every person in there can apply under the family reunification option, that's open to them to have six more family members Come and join them here in their new lives in Ireland, the 550 people there could turn into 3,000 people very, very quickly.
And it's overwhelming.
We've got one doctor in the village.
He has said he won't be taking anybody on.
He doesn't have the capacity.
I understand there was a doctor in a neighboring town.
He was providing care to the Ukrainians.
He said that when the IPAs come in, he's not taking it.
He doesn't have the capacity.
The schools are under pressure.
Everything is under pressure here.
And we just really want our hotel back, to be honest with you.
We want, look, we're a very compassionate people.
The Irish people are very compassionate people.
But we feel that our compassion and our generosity is being taken advantage of by a government who are not enforcing our immigration laws to begin with.
How are people getting on a plane with documents and then managing to come through with no documents?
It's a farce.
It's an absolute joke.
And that's the first thing, in my opinion, that should be addressed.
If somebody gets off a plane, you cannot get on without documents.
If somebody gets off a plane without documents, they should be immediately sent back to the country from where they came.
That's my opinion.
You mentioned your local TD, or what we would call a local MP member of parliament, is supportive.
I'm going to challenge you on that.
I haven't heard a single member of the Irish Parliament speak out against that.
Is he supportive when he's just speaking in whispers with you or is he supportive publicly?
No, you can challenge away, Ezra.
The man I'm talking about is Matty McGraw, and he is a TD here in Tipperary.
And he has not only has he been to the gates here several times, he has stood up in the doll, our Irish parliament, and he has challenged the government spoken out.
Good to hear it.
He is supportive.
What party is he with?
He's an independent.
Well, that's why, isn't it?
Isn't that it?
And was he elected as an independent?
He's elected as an independent.
Well, that's a recommendation for independence, isn't it?
Can I just say the ridicule that he faces?
Matty is a country person, like we're all ordinary country people.
He's a country accent.
People ridicule him.
They make fun of him.
But he is a man of the utmost integrity.
And he is probably the only person that we currently have who has the courage to speak out.
And there is a local councillor as well, Liam Brown, and he is a man of courage also.
He is standing with us and he is fighting for us.
So we're very lucky to have both of those.
But as far as we're concerned, the rest of them have sold us out.
Now, if there is work going on in the background that they're not prepared to speak of, I'm an eternal optimist.
I would hope for that, but we have seen nothing.
What I've learned from other places, Newtown, Mount Kennedy, Kulock, and Dublin, is that this is announced to the local community as a fait accompli.
There's no consultation, no town halls.
If you were to build a skyscraper here, if you were to build a giant wind turbine, if you were to build a mine in the ground, you would have years of environmental and parking and traffic and congestion.
Impact reports, everything.
They'd be looking at the impact on services in the community, environmental impacts, economic impacts.
I mean, one of the huge impacts on the village, Dundrum was always a thriving village, a really economic hub.
I mean, I can't even tell you the number of businesses, all doing trade, all doing well.
And because that's when the hotel was in.
The hotel is a beautiful, and the golf course is one of the most beautiful I've ever seen.
Will the golf course remain open if there's hundreds of refugees in there?
It's very hard to know because we don't know.
I can't imagine it.
Well, we don't know.
We don't know.
That guy who sped by in his BMW is probably not stopping to tell you.
Well, no, we're not hearing anything directly from him.
I can't suppose to know what's in his head, but and I won't speak about him directly.
But what I would say is, if I was somebody who had a property and was prepared to sell the soul of my community for money, this is all about money.
It's greed, pure, and simple.
then I would shoehorn people into every available place.
What a disgrace.
It's an absolute disgrace.
As I drove in, I went by the rock of Cashel, which was just so stunning.
And I looked it up and, you know, it was the seat of kings.
And it was St. Patrick himself was said to have gone through there.
It's just majestic.
And I think of the people who would have been in there and their hopes for Ireland.
And if, correct my history if I'm wrong, if King Angus, if the other Irish leaders of the past were to see what is being done here for a few pieces of silver, I think they would be furious.
The Reality of Our Situation00:10:12
I think they would take out their swords and shields and march on this place.
I think for a few millions of dollars, this ancient community is being sold out and it disgusts me.
That's exactly what's been happening.
This community has been sold out.
The Irish people are being sold out.
We're not being listened to.
The politicians appear to have forgotten that they work for us.
What can you do?
Is there a legal mechanism?
Do you have a lawyer who's examined perhaps the law?
Is there some way to appeal this?
I'm being told there is not, but have you investigated that?
Do you have any firepower?
Yeah, we do.
I don't want to say too much about what's going on because we're at a very delicate stage of this.
But for as much as anyone driving past will see a presence at the gate, we also have teams in the background and they are working to look at the legalities of contracts and arrangements and agreements that are being entered into.
So for instance, we mentioned there the contract to house on a temporary basis the Ukrainians.
And then with a lot of, some of the Ukrainians are moving on themselves.
A lot of them maybe are going home for whatever reason.
And so now apparently a new hybrid contract is being entered into or has been entered into.
We don't know because no one is showing us paperwork.
But what that says is that two communities, they cannot mix.
So the government itself thinks, I've heard two countries mentioned, Somalia and Nigeria.
And again, listen, I don't have any better information than you, so you correct me if I'm wrong.
So they're moving out the Ukrainians because they don't think that they can coexist with this new community wherever they're from.
And you suspect they're from Africa?
Do you have any intel at all?
I heard Somalia and Nigeria, but that's probably just gossip.
A lot of that probably is gossip.
And the truth is we don't know.
But I want to stress for us here as a group, it doesn't matter where they're from.
If they're incompatible, if the government itself thinks they're incompatible with Ukrainians.
Look, the government will have to speak to that.
I can't say why.
We know if they're, do we, you mentioned that there's mums, dads, and kids.
You mentioned that some of the Ukrainian kids go to school.
And I seem to hear that you're saying that the Ukrainians have more or less integrated in the community.
Is that correct?
That is correct.
Well, then let me ask you, do we know anything about the nature of who will be in here in this next wave?
Will they be families, mum, dad, kid, or will they be single men?
Will they be single military-aged men, which is what I see when I look around the center of Dublin and what they're worried about happening in Kulak?
Do we know anything about the character of the next community that is being foisted on Dundrum?
Well, that's really the nub of the problem that we don't know who is coming in.
I do want to make one point, Ezra.
I'm a mother of four sons.
So I don't assume that just because someone is male, that they will be of a particular disposition, whatever age they are.
And I would be very upset if someone assumed, gosh, there's four boys there.
They must be violent.
They must be whatever.
So I won't stand for that.
But our problem is that we don't know who's coming in.
And just from our, look, we've all seen the same reports that you have seen.
The reality is that we don't know.
And that's why we are fearful.
Because if what is playing out everywhere plays out here in Dundrum, we may find ourselves in that situation.
Well, that's the thing.
You don't know.
And so the mind imagines.
And listen, I'm a man myself and I understand what you're saying about you cannot cast dispersions on somebody.
When you bring people in from a different culture that has different approaches to women, to a woman out on a bicycle or jogging, there are places in the world where that is considered morally and ethically inappropriate.
I would imagine that the Ukrainian refugees here have some cultural overlap.
And if you don't even know who's coming in.
You don't even know what the challenge is.
I find that astonishing.
What will happen if one day, or it might be the dead of...
Can I follow up to what you just said?
Go ahead.
Actually, if you don't mind.
Yeah, as I said, I'm a mother of four sons and I've made this point here before.
Let's just, and because I'm an eternal optimist, let's say a busload of people arrives and let's say it is all men.
Let's say they come here and they are fleeing something.
And let's say they all, by circumstance, found themselves on this one bus into a country and a place they've never been before.
And they then are expected to live in harmony.
Now, those four sons I mentioned earlier, if I left them on their own in a room for an hour, they are brothers and they love each other, but war would break out.
So my concern is if you are shoehorning people who don't necessarily know each other into a compact area and expect them to live in harmony, we're fooling ourselves.
That's just not going to happen and that's how things spill over.
And they don't have language skills and they probably don't have job skills.
And if they're allowed to work, what are they going to work?
And if they're not allowed to work, what are they going to do all day?
And it's taking an average of 18 months, we understand, to process somebody's application for asylum to determine if they are eligible to be given asylum.
That's 18 months where you don't know who's living in your community.
And I made the point to somebody before.
You know, I moved into this community.
Nobody knew who I was.
I'm not from here.
And people could say, well, sure, if you only you rocked on here and no one knew who you were and no one gave you a hard time about being here.
But if anyone had come to my door and said, sorry, we do need to verify who you are.
I can show my passport.
I can show my driving license and I can show who I am.
I've got my papers.
I've got my documents.
People do not get on planes without documents.
How could they come out the other side?
There's no planes from Mogadishu to Dublin.
There's no planes from Lagos to, like they come from an intermediary country.
We know they're coming through the UK as well.
Right.
And the UK, I've been there.
It's not a war zone.
There's no threat to anyone.
These folks are shopping around.
How can you deny it?
What do you mean shopping around?
Shopping around for, I mean, if they're in France, if they're in the UK and they choose to come to Ireland, listen, I just spent some time walking through these grounds.
I would move here from Canada.
It's so gorgeous.
That's what I mean by shopping around.
You could be a refugee claimant in France or in the UK, but why not come to the softest touch?
Why not come for the suckers?
The suckers who will abide anything, put you up in a luxury four-star hotel on a golf course and let you bring five family members over.
I love the Irish people, but your government is probably the stupidest government in the West.
Look, they're selling us out.
There's no, you won't get any argument from any of us here.
They are selling us out.
I think we are suckers to put up with what we've put up with.
We've got a housing crisis in Ireland.
There's a healthcare crisis in Ireland.
I heard a radio interview yesterday.
There was a poor mother on her little boy has scoliosis and he's gone.
So our Taoiseach, our prime minister, stood up in Ardal, our parliament, and said that no child with scoliosis would wait longer than more than six months for an operation.
And this child now, his mother, is fearful that he's reached the point where he cannot be helped because he's had to wait so long.
You know, we are suckers for putting up with it.
And, you know, we are suckers if we don't hold the government accountable.
I don't even blame the people coming in, to be honest with you.
I blame the government for not enforcing our immigration laws.
And the amounts of money that they're paying to people who are providing this accommodation is outrageous.
We're taxpayers.
We're working our fingers to the bone and we've never had a little show for it.
And, you know, if they were to have the money or drastically reduce the money that they're paying people to offer this accommodation, I'd love to see how generous these property owners would be in that instance.
Or even if they made them pay tax on it.
Well, Fiona, I want to apply for refugee status because I would live on this golf course in this paradise for 18 months or how long I could get away with it.
Yeah, well, what I'd say about that is if you do, do it soon and enjoy the golf course because our fear is that there may not be a golf course for a finish.
Because one of the points I said earlier, if I was prepared to sell my soul for money, there's an awful lot of land attached to that golf course.
We see modular homes going up in places in Ireland.
Who's to say that Dundrum isn't next?
Last question for you.
So you have an encampment here.
You have about a half a dozen people at this moment.
I imagine the crowd waxes and wanes.
Maybe you even have people here overnight.
But let's say one night at 2 a.m., a big coach bus pulls up with 50 souls in it from who knows where, and it approaches the gates.
What happens then?
I mean, it's a moral statement.
It's a political statement that you're here, but they might speed through just as quick as the proprietor did.
Well, look, I mean, I'm sure you won't be insulted if I say we're going to keep our powder dry in that one.
We're not going to announce what our plans may or may not be.
The reality of the situation is we probably don't fully know ourselves.
None of us has ever been in a situation like this before, but I want to reiterate the point that we are a peaceful protest.
We've been peaceful from the start and we are resolved to be peaceful throughout.
We've seen how things flare up in other communities.
That approach has not worked anywhere else.
I don't see how it's going to approach how it's going to work here in Dundrum.
We will just keep fighting and we'll keep working away in the background.
But whatever happens, we're not giving up on this.
We're not giving up on a hotel.
We want our hotel back.
We want to bring Dundrum back to life and we want to restore Dundrum as a destination, not a place with tumbleweed in the village that people just drive through on their way to somewhere else.
Thanks so much for talking with us and educating us.
And we're going to keep an eye on Dundrum.
And what happens here, I won't lie to you, Fiona, I'm pessimistic because I've seen the government's iron resolve.
I've seen how they've denounced other, as you say, severely normal or ordinary people.
They denounce anyone who's worried about their community.
They call them names.
They call them racists.
They call them, I don't even, it's just far right, whatever that means.
We've been called all of those names, but we know who we are.
Genuine Disappointment00:08:48
You know, we're good people.
We're honest people.
We're decent people.
We're just people who want to live our lives in the community that we chose to live in.
And that's really what we want.
And maybe somewhere that, you know, if we do have a family celebration or a family sad occasion, that we have got somewhere to go.
We want to bring back the hub of the village.
This hotel was the jewel in West Tipperary.
And we want to bring, and we actually want the man who owns it to fulfill his promises to restore the hotel, upgrade the golf course, although it's already magnificent.
You saw it yourself, bring the pool back into use.
The leisure centre is still in use.
And there was talk of a distillery there as well.
This place can be absolutely magnificent.
And if there is a hotel, you're out there watching this.
You've heard Ezra say this is a beautiful place, a beautiful place to live.
Lovely people, the nicest people you meet anywhere.
And if you've got a few bob in your pocket and you want to buy a hotel, you'll be guaranteed of our support every Friday and Saturday night if needs be.
I tell you, I come from a beautiful place, Alberta, Canada.
We think of Banff and Lake Louise.
I've been to some beautiful places in the world, including Davos, Switzerland, when we cover the World Economic Forum.
But I have to say, walking around the grounds of this hotel and country club and golf club in Dundrum, Ireland, it's achingly beautiful.
It reminds me of the poem by the Japanese haiku writer Basho who said, even in Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo cry, I long for Kyoto.
Even when he was there, he missed it.
And that's how I felt walking through this.
It's an impossible beauty and you ache for it.
And even though I've never been here before, and even though I'm here now, I feel nostalgic for it.
Your family once owned this.
And I can only imagine the love you feel for this place.
Yeah, I have their nice words, by the way, because I have a huge connection with this, with the grounds here, with the house itself.
I grew up here pretty much.
My parents bought this place when I was born, the year I was born, 1978, and they opened it up as a hotel three years later.
So it's been in my life from a very early age.
And all of my family, we worked and lived pretty much lived here.
My parents worked very, very hard to keep it open as a beautiful hotel.
My dad established the grounds as a golf course during that time as well.
Yeah, it was our life.
I heard that it's the used to be a place where weddings were, and the grounds are spectacular, picturesque.
I could imagine every weekend there would be a wedding here.
Oh, yeah, weddings were huge here because, yeah, obviously aesthetically beautiful, but also there was always a great sense of family within the walls of Dundrum House.
All the people who worked there, you know, it was wonderful to grow up there.
And it was, from what I heard, it was not just a meeting place and a beautiful place aesthetically, but it was a hub of economic activity, jobs, not just jobs for people on the grounds, but little contracts in town.
Yeah, hugely.
Like, so you would have been talking about the 80s and the 90s.
The 80s were a time where people didn't actually have a huge amount.
People were happy but had didn't have a whole lot.
Community was really, really important, really, really strong.
We were there for each other.
Everybody who worked there, you know, were able to raise their families from that.
Lots of us went through college earning our keep there.
There was always, I don't think anyone would disagree with the fact that people who worked there, we all felt like family.
And like, look, there's always ups and downs in any situation, but I have to say, I learned so much from being part of Dundrum House Hotel as it was.
Now it feels disconnected.
Now there's secrecy, not family.
Now there's backroom deals with the government, no scrutiny, no open house.
We saw the owner speed in today, didn't stop, hasn't made himself available, is taking this beautiful place and is wringing it out for money, selling it not to the local community, but selling it to the politicians for their own uses for mass immigration.
How do you feel about that?
Deeply disappointed, deeply, deeply disappointed with what's going on nationwide.
We are just one of many communities dealing with this.
This place here, Dundrum House, has still got huge potential to provide jobs for our community, to provide a place for people to come and stay and enjoy themselves and go back and tell other people about it.
Dundrum is a beautiful, beautiful place.
I love it very much.
it's very sad that the government are doing this to the people of ireland that we have to stand here for weeks on end and it's it feels like an invasion of sorts You know, we're not getting a chance to have our say.
We feel very disempowered and that is a crazy, crazy place to be.
It's hard to believe.
Yeah, it's hard to believe that Dundrum House is going through this change.
You know, and as I said, it's nationwide.
There's many communities being affected by this.
And we need to be heard.
We all have a voice here and we should be heard.
It's very, very important.
But why?
Why would it be sold out?
Is it just about money?
Is there another force at work?
Why would the government be doing this?
This is such a picturesque and historical area.
The Rock of Castle, there's history and culture and language and community and continuity.
And suddenly the whole population of Dundrum is being tripled by people.
We don't even know who they are.
I don't understand it.
Why is this happening?
Well, look, I don't know if that's a question for me.
I don't know if that's even something that we can answer right now.
Ultimately, there are decisions being made.
By whom?
Well, they're made up in government.
Are they even being made in Ireland?
Again, I don't know that that's a question for me right now because it's so huge.
Your family's, I'll move away from the political questions.
I understand that that's not your area of expertise.
Your expertise is this place.
You grew up here, you worked here, this was your home and your personal home and your communal home.
What does the rest of your family think about this?
What does the rest of the community?
What do people in Dundrum think about this?
Is it split or is it overwhelming?
Are people afraid to speak out lest they be called racist or something?
Well, definitely at the beginning, there was a huge element when we started this protest.
The word racist was being used or far right or whatever.
What does even that mean?
I know.
Well, look, ultimately, they're just words that are probably put out there to suppress us, keep us down, keep us quiet.
Which is, you know, it's very important that we have a freedom of speech, that we get to say how we feel.
I think there is nothing at all wrong with the fact that we stand here for our community.
We have genuine concerns, genuine, genuine concerns.
You mentioned about population and the, you know, we've a relatively small population here and it will be doubled quite possibly in time.
I don't know that we're ready for that.
I don't know that we have the services in place for that.
We're already under immense pressure.
Let me ask you one last question.
You grew up here.
Whether Dreams Come True00:01:22
So did your whole family.
Is there any sense that it's possible to take this back, to take this hotel back?
It's got so much potential, I've got to say, just as a prospective tourist, like this is such a gem.
Instead of transforming it into a refugee camp, I've got to think that there's some tycoon or maybe just a group of people who buy it back.
Is that a possibility or am I dreaming?
Well, I'm dreaming that same dream.
I would so love, as I'm sure many others would, to see Dundrum House Hotel being run as it is meant to be to provide, as I already said, for the community in the way it, like it was a place for people to come together.
Whether it was a wedding or whether it was a funeral, it was a place where people would come together.
There has been amazing times spent in there.
You know, people have so many stories, so many stories.
It's endless.
And for it, would be a dream come true for it to serve in that way again in the future.