As an anti-immigrant encampment dwindles on Basin View, its organisers try to rally

On Thursday, about noon, Damien Farrell small-talked with his neighbours on Basin View, a stone’s throw from the Fatima Luas stop. 

“You can see the glow on you,” he said, laughing, to a tanned, slender man.

Farrell lives just up the road, a few feet away from Basin View, the entrance to which is marked at the moment by two tricolours. On Thursday, one of the flags was rolled up around the lamppost. 

Inside the street, just opposite Canal Way Educate Together school and right outside a building where a small group of men seeking asylum live, a large pointy red tent is pitched.

More big and small tricolours sprout from the tent. Right next to the asylum shelter, a blue sheet covers abandoned scaffolding. “That couldn’t go ahead,” says Farrell.

Graffiti on the partitions shielding the scaffolding – which is also lined with mini tricolours – reads: “Dublin 8 Says No”. 

Plans for the expansion of the asylum centre on the street were scrapped after a sit-in and protests in May. 

But protestors became aware that a small group of men seeking asylum already lived there, and some of them decided to linger outside. Gardaí have sometimes stood a short distance away, down the lane, peering at the encampment.

Later in May, a teenager wielding a knife reportedly chased a “foreign” man dropping kids off at school one morning onto the grounds of St James’s Primary School, punched and threatened him, and shouted “Dublin 8 says no!” Gardaí arrested the boy.

Now, a couple of months on, a different person, Anthony Duggan, one of the guys involved in Dublin 8 Says No, is planning a Says No Football League, with its first game slated for 2 August on the grounds of a nearby council-estate football pitch. The poster for the event also promises barbecue and music from a DJ.

Duggan has called for Says No groups from all over to come out and play and join the “League of Éire 5 asides”.

Now, some locals and activists are worried that the group is looking to grow its influence and deepen divisions using football as a vehicle.

Farrell – who is a member of Liberties Football Alliance, which includes some Dublin 8 Football clubs – says locals had fought hard for a revamp of the Marrowbone Lane buildings’ football pitch.

“And a lot of residents in this community are upset that this event is happening [here],” he says.

He wants the council – which owns the pitch – to be more proactive about dealing with events like that. “We look at DCC as supporting the integration process.”

A spokesperson for the council said it had not authorised the use of Marrowbone Lane pitch for a Says No football tournament. It’s monitoring the situation, they said. 

People need to request permission to use the pitch “for anything other than general community”, they said. And that’s decided on a case-by-case basis.

The spokesperson did not address a query asking if Duggan had applied for permission to use it.

Duggan did not respond to queries sent to his Facebook page on 24 July, including one asking if he had applied.  

With great understanding

The gates to the football pitch of Marrowbone Lane flats were open on Thursday. Residents have a key and can lock it if they want to, said Farrell.

It has two basketball hoops. One of them was missing a net, and a swing hung from the side of its backboard.

Little boys played outside the flats. Two Black men slipped out a door and strolled by.

Farrell points to how the Marrowbone Lane buildings are homes to all kinds of people, living quietly side-by-side 

Duggan is from St Teresa’s Gardens, near Rialto.

In a way, says Farrell, his experiences make him a great person for championing community reform. 

He says that because of Duggan's past openness about grappling with and overcoming drug addiction.

At 21, he got done for selling hard drugs as a gang member, sentenced to 12 years in jail in 2007 with the four final years suspended, “on the condition that he keeps the peace”, according to a 9 February 2007 article in the Evening Herald.

Duggan was caught with a bag of heroin worth €164,671 and over €8,000 in cash, it says. 

He wasn’t a user at the time, he said on the podcast Yup the Flats in 2022, but got hooked on heroin in prison.

Farrell, of Liberties Football Alliance, says he has sympathy for that. The heroin epidemic engulfed swaths of the inner-city and its youth for decades, he says.

“There are a few families that were unscathed. Users became the dealers, dealers became the users,” he said, standing at the entrance of Marrowbone Lane flats’ football pitch.

Rialto had particularly grappled with the city’s heroin crisis.

Farrell says Duggan could become a good advocate for the maligned and misunderstood, and aid a culture of togetherness in his community. 

“There’s no better person than somebody who has paid the price, has been arrested, convicted, sentenced, done that time and came out,” he said.

In 2022, before he became active in the anti-immigrant scene, Duggan said on the podcast Yup the Flats that he had turned his life around.

“I have the experience of being a drug addict, I have the experience of being in prison, and now, as I said, I’m a negative gone to a positive.”

He said having a “monkey see monkey do” attitude is what got him to choose a path that led to prison. 

He wants to do good, like chaperoning troubled teens onto a better path, said Duggan.

He knows how to talk to them, he said. “I can speak to him the way a probation officer can’t. I can read him the way he can’t.”

“I definitely would like to stand in a courtroom one day and be able to tell a judge that this is what I did,” Duggan said. 

Living with it 

Monga Nyathi is one of the men who lives at the asylum shelter on Basin View.

He is a young Black guy with a shy smile. At the nearby U Café on James’s Street on Monday, he said he was growing used to the encampment outside their place. “Before, I was scared,” he said.

When it first started, he’d already lived there for about a year, he said. A couple of his roommates decided to leave, said Nyathi. 

He is hoping that the protestors leave them alone as the summer fades and it gets colder, said Nyathi.

These days, the tent isn’t really manned between Monday and Wednesday, he said. But around six guys mill about, sometimes drinking, usually between Thursday and Sunday, said Nyathi.

“Some of them are aggressive. I remember one day, I was just getting inside, one of the guys told me, ‘I’m gonna hit you,’” he said.

His buddies told him to simmer down, Nyathi said. 

Where words fail 

Farrell, the Liberties community activist, says after the knife assault in late May, some locals who’d initially joined the protest withdrew from the Dublin 8 Says No group. 

Some still share their views about asylum centres but choose to call themselves “concerned parents” now, Farrell said, which bothers him because it invokes the groups in the area formed by mums and dads to protect their kids from drug pushers in the 1980s – like Inchicore Concerned Parents Against Drugs. 

“The original concerned parents established a foothold here, in this community, and in Dolphin’s House, were the strongest ones in fighting back against the first wave of heroin addiction,” he said. 

Michael Pidgeon, a Green Party councillor representing the area, says support for those camping out on Basin View has dived. And their numbers have thinned.

He reckons the football tournament is a way to “draw particularly young people into this movement”.

Both Farrell and Pidgeon say talks have been had between the protestors, local representatives, and the company behind the asylum shelter. 

Pidgeon says the group’s demands were fuzzy and kept shifting during these talks.

The company had planned to expand the asylum centre, but faced with protests, abandoned construction work. 

Dublin 8 Says no protestors at one point floated the idea of turning it into a homeless shelter, says Pidgeon. 

“At one point, they said, they wanted like a solicitor letter that the guy [behind the company] was going to apply for planning permission for homeless accommodation,” he said by phone on Thursday.

Then they made an about-face on that, he says. “They were like we don’t want more homeless. I think they would also be probably surprised to find the national makeup of homelessness in Dublin.”

Those seeking asylum can’t access mainstream homeless emergency shelters until they win permanent residency papers. 

But leaving the asylum accommodation system has been the largest driver of homelessness for single people in Dublin in the past six months.

Generally, immigrants are more likely to fall into homelessness than people born in Ireland, research suggests.  

Farrell says that, ultimately, those remaining on Basin View want to evict the small group of men who’ve been living in the neighbourhood, some for longer than two years, minding their own business. 

They’ve lived such quiet lives that many of their neighbours didn’t even know there was an asylum shelter there, he said.

It’s been stressful for the men to live in close proximity to an encampment that demands their disappearance every day, says Farrell.

“Someone has lost their job as a result of not being able to get in and out at certain times based on the advice given to them,” he says.

Some locals had told him not to chance it, he says. Nyathi, the resident, says that’s true, that happened. 

Duggan, who is a member of Dublin 8 Says No, did not respond to a query about the group’s end goal.

Expect delays 

Dismantling an anti-immigrant encampment is dicey. 

In Coolock, doing so unleashed chaos and sparked arson after arson at the old Crown Paints building last summer.  

The government eventually backtracked on its plans to renovate and turn that building into a shelter for people seeking asylum, which was celebrated in anti-immigrant circles as a win and proof that protests like that pay off. 

A spokesperson for An Garda Síochána did not say if there were any plans to root out the encampment on Basin View. “Was there any offence committed?” they said.

They referred queries about plans for a football tournament and whether they have been briefed about it to Dublin City Council, “as it relates to the use of a public amenity”.

Farrell says there’s a social side to the encampment, too. Some see it as an opportunity to get together, have coffee or drinks and shoot the breeze. 

Getting away with it 

Another difficulty in tackling Says No groups and their activities, like encampments, is the rewards of generating anti-immigrant content on social media – whether through engagement and a sense of recognition, or actual revenue. 

Since 2022, Duggan has been running accounts on various social media platforms under the title “This is Dublin”.

“He [is] usually on the scene as incidents happen, and reports a lot of good about our wonderful city too,” said a post dated July 2022 on the neighbourhood Facebook page St Teresa’s Gardens Members Group.

In the same year, Duggan said on the podcast Yup the Flats that since his release from Mountjoy Prison after eight years, he was looking to grow a “fan base”.

“I wanted to start my podcast. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t figure a way of getting the fan base,” he said at the time.

When Duggan recently shared a photo of himself on Facebook, seemingly livestreaming a protest, standing next to a guard, he captioned it: “I’m excited to start this new creative journey in professional mode!”

As some social media companies pare back moderation and amplify harmful content, anti-immigrant activism has become another online-influencer job, says Farrell.

“Unfortunately, he [Duggan] chose negative content,” he said.

Duggan has nearly 14,000 followers on X and over 123,000 on Instagram.

He’s labelled his account on X as “Media and News Company” and mostly posts anti-immigrant videos, often to cast blame on people who moved here from elsewhere and push the debunked trope that they are predisposed to violence.

On Instagram, his account bio suggests he sells ads. “DM for advertising on TiD [This is Dublin] media platforms,” it says.

In real life, though, Farrell wants to see more action from the city council to stop events that help anti-immigrant groups further their agenda, he said.

Even if Duggan or anyone at Dublin 8 Says No haven’t applied to the council, the council can get in touch to ask more questions, he said. Whether they have insurance, approved providers for food and entertainment, and so forth, he said. 

They have to ensure that nothing unpleasant or disruptive that can smear the residents of Marrowbone Lane flats happens, he said. 

“There’s loads of things they could be doing, they can say, ‘Who do we talk to? There’s no point of contact.’”

“Monitoring the situation is not good enough,” he said.