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SHANNON town faces the risk of becoming divided even further as persons on either side of the debate on whether asylum seekers should be housed in emergency accommodation in the Industrial Estate air their views, writes Páraic McMahon.

Dominic Haugh has lived in Shannon since 1983, he was

Speaking to The Clare Echo, the secondary school teacher stressed that current difficulties in the country cannot be blamed on asylum seekers. “People should be informed of what is going on in their own community and the Government isn’t doing that, the danger is if you pick an issue like the refugee crisis and then begin using that to say we can’t take anymore, if all 70,000 refugees were kicked out of the country tomorrow morning it wouldn’t solve the housing crisis, it wouldn’t solve the health crisis or the crisis with facilities here”.

He added, “The danger with picking on a particular cohort is that you create division within a community, that is the point I was trying to make with regards to what happened in Shannon in 1972 and 1973, there was this attitude and these concerns but eventually the people of Shannon realised that the people coming here were victims and they em- braced what was going on, it created a community in Shannon, the people from the North helped build the town, Shannon as a community is hugely diverse, it has different religions and different nationalities, the stuff being said by some people not by everybody that we don’t who these people are and what countries they are coming from, the vast majority of these people are coming from countries where there is war, where there is famine, violence and terror.

“If you dump 400 people into a hotel and give them nothing to do and don’t tell them what is happening, eventually stuff will boil over, to say everyone in Killarney who is an asylum seeker and a refugee is causing problems is not true. We have no idea what the plan is for here, people are saying there are going to be 1000 people up in the Industrial Estate, we don’t know that, we know nothing but because of things like social media everything gets heightened and blown out of proportion completely, then some people step into the vacuum and create division. “