Assignment: Is Ireland’s reputation for tolerance under threat?
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ireland is known as the land of a hundred thousand welcomes. But the government says the country has run out of accommodation to house all new eligible refugee arrivals. Some properties earmarked to house asylum seekers have been fire-bombed and others are subject to protests. Hundreds of people seeking asylum have been forced to sleep in tents in Dublin and elsewhere. Ireland has taken in around 100,000 people from Ukraine and the number of people seeking international protection from other countries has increased four-fold since pre-Covid times. The government has slashed benefits for new arrivals from Ukraine and limited to three months the time it will guarantee to house them. As the country leads up to local, national and European elections, migration is rising up the political agenda. Is Ireland’s reputation for tolerance under threat?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 1969, a plan to show support for an anti-racism protest turned the lives of 14 promising |
| 0:07.0 | black student athletes upside down. |
| 0:09.8 | Amazing sport stories from the BBC World Service tells their story. |
| 0:14.0 | Search for Amazing Sports Stories, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:18.0 | Thank you for downloading this podcast from the BBC. |
| 0:22.0 | I'm Katie Flannery and in this episode of |
| 0:25.1 | assignment I'm traveling in County Cork in Dublin in Ireland to find out |
| 0:29.2 | whether our well-known reputation for hospitality and tolerance is under threat as the number of people seeking |
| 0:35.1 | protection and asylum increases. |
| 0:39.7 | This is Rings End, a suburb of the Irish capital, Dublin, close to the city's port. |
| 0:45.0 | There's a church, a cafe, a local shop, and a yellow painted pub called the Shepright. |
| 0:51.0 | From a distance it looks like most other pubs but as you get |
| 0:54.9 | closer you can see the scorch and smoke marks above the windows and the roof has |
| 0:59.4 | caved in. On New Year's Eve the pub was subjected to an arson attack in the mistaken belief |
| 1:05.0 | that it was going to be used to house refugees. |
| 1:08.0 | It's one of several attacks which have had the potential to dent Ireland's reputation as the country of 100,000 welcomes. |
| 1:16.4 | What we're looking at at the moment is a burnt-house building. |
| 1:19.8 | You can see glass shattered, you can see the roof caved in from the fire and it was blazing flames |
| 1:26.4 | New Year's Eve when it happened around two. I had received quite a number of phone calls |
| 1:31.1 | from residents who were scared who were terrified. |
| 1:34.3 | Phone calls from migrant families worried about what this meant. |
| 1:38.6 | I'm Katie Flannery and this is the documentary from the BBC World Service. |
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