You live in a housing estate full of young families in County Tipperary where you know all your neighbours and enjoy a peaceful life. Your kids are friends with the neighbours kids and they all play together in the fields across the road. Then one day the government decides to build a migrant/refugee plantation in the very fields your kids play in. The entire community protests, Irish workers even quit their jobs on the site once they learn its purpose. But the plantation moves ahead regardless because the owners import foreign workers. Months later your life has been turned upside down and you’re faced with the prospect of having a walled off, purpose built village full of foreigners directory across the road from your home. Your kids are confused but you don’t know what to tell them because even to you, it doesn’t make sense why any government would do this to their own people. This is reality for the people of Clonmel.

Posted by Fred Bassett