In Balbriggan, a battle over build-to-rent housing stirred up a rumour weaponising asylum seekers and refugees

A little after 1pm on Saturday, Bryn Edwards and his colleagues had just finished handing out copies of a leaflet outside the SuperValu on Balbriggan’s Main Street.

The hand-out addressed a narrative swirling since 24 March about the nearby old Tesco shopping centre,  a vast and rundown building resting in front of a casino just off Main Street.

A week and a half ago, the Sunday Independent ran a story saying that Rhonellen Developments, which owns the building, was looking to switch up its original plans to topple it and develop build-to-rent flats.

Instead, says the article, the developers were drawing up fresh plans to turn it into a “refugee centre”, because of an ongoing legal challenge by a community group to the original project.

The article doesn’t say where the information came from. Fearghal O’Connor, deputy business editor of the Sunday Independent, who reported it, said by email that he couldn’t reveal his sources.

But Edwards, a candidate for People Before Profit in the upcoming local elections, says that no matter who flagged it, it looks like weaponising asylum seekers and refugees, riding on the wave of ongoing anti-immigrant campaigns.

It also distracts from genuine concerns around the original pitch for the site and stokes division, he said.

Anti-immigrant keywords like “unvetted males” cropped up a bunch when he was chatting to locals about it, said Edwards.

Edwards’ leaflet calls on Fingal County Council to purchase the site itself, and asks locals to sign a petition supporting that. Tony Murphy, a local independent councillor, has posted a video on his Facebook page with a similar ask.

A spokesperson for Fingal County Council said it can’t comment on potential acquisitions, “for reasons of commercial sensitivity”.

In an email on Thursday, A.J. Noonan, managing director of Rhonellen Developments, didn’t say if some kind of accommodation centre is part of a new plan for the site. But, he said, “we made no announcement in any way nor did we instigate the article”.

Noonan declined to say whether the company would consider selling the land if the council stumped up to buy. “No further comments from us,” he said.

The history

Sitting vacant for more than a decade, the facade of the shabby building onto Quay Street has looked more or less the same for years, with peeling cream paint and a row of giant shuttered archways at ground level.

On Saturday, Owen McCormack, another People Before Profit member, points to the side of the building. “You can still see the ‘BSC’ up there,” he says.

That’s short for Balbriggan Shopping Centre, painted in brown and fading.

In August 2021, Rhonellen Developments applied to An Bord Pleanála seeking permission to develop 101 build-to-rent apartments in three blocks of up to six storeys.

Fingal County Council planners told An Bord Pleanála that they thought the proposal should be refused, says the board’s inspector’s report.

Council planners pointed to concerns about overdevelopment, the quality of the design and layout, adequate daylight, and the mix of apartment sizes, which was made up in the submission of 19 studios, 41 one-beds and 41 two-beds.

In November 2021, An Bord Pleanála approved the scheme, but with a long list of conditions, including that there be 95 homes rather than 101.

Balbriggan Community Council, a local group, filed an application seeking an order to quash that decision, and got the go-ahead to pursue that from Mr Justice Richard Humphreys on 7 February 2022.

In early March, ABP decided not to defend the planning permission alongside Rhonellen Developments in court, said a spokesperson for the body on Tuesday.

The matter will go ahead between the notice party and the applicant, they said.

Áine O’Beirne, the secretary for Balbriggan Community Council, said the group couldn’t comment on anything at the moment. “As we are still involved in the Judicial Review process.”

In a note on a crowdfunder for the legal action in January 2022, the group said:  “We feel that it is in the best interests of Balbriggan to challenge this decision and avoid the Town Centre being overdeveloped with small build-to-rent studio apartments.”

Edwards, the local People Before Profit representative, says he is against the development because ordinary people in Balbriggan wouldn’t be able to afford the flats.

He wants to see the council buy the site and build social housing, he said on Saturday. “They’re not going to produce affordable homes, they’re producing homes for profit.”

What is happening?

A spokesperson for the Department of Children and Equality said it can only confirm if a premises is to be used as asylum accommodation once a contract is signed.

And, after that, it would “in the first instance, inform local public representatives and statutory agencies through its Community Engagement Team”, they said.

Last week, an anti-immigrant media outlet picked up the news about rumoured new plans for the site first reported by the Sunday Independent, and it caromed through extremist Telegram channels, where members said it should be resisted.

Karen Power, a local Green Party councillor, said it seemed to her to have been leaked to create unnecessary fear.

She’s not sure the Department of Children and Equality would even accept offers of properties like this one that are earmarked for housing, to repurpose instead as accommodation for asylum seekers, she said.

On the evening of 24 March, when the Sunday Independent ran the story, Murphy, the local independent councillor, uploaded a video to Facebook.

He had gotten many emails, WhatsApps and texts from people about it, he said in the video. He looks serious and seems to try to comfort constituents that this is not going to happen anytime soon.

The developers are now considering going into pre-planning talks with Fingal County Council about its new plans for the site and assume that Fingal will support this new concept, he says.

“I’m confident that they won’t – and they shouldn’t,” he says.

A spokesperson for Fingal County Council said on Thursday that there has been no request for a pre-planning meeting with the council about the site.

By phone on Tuesday, Murphy said the news report had stoked division and hatred.

Constituents who had contacted him didn’t want asylum seekers to be housed there, said Murphy. They had concerns that that might drain community resources for locals, he said.

“The community of Balbriggan are at the moment suffering of lack of services in many different areas,” Murphy said.

Ollie Power, a People Before Profit representative running for a council seat in Swords, who was out on Saturday helping Edwards, said it’s not right to inflame the situation by bringing up asylum seekers, given what is happening in Coolock.

In Coolock late last month, there were large anti-immigrant protests.

Power says that no matter who pushed the story, people in Balbriggan were aware of it on Saturday.

But it was good to talk to people, he says. “We spent two hours talking about it to people, and I came away feeling kind of better about it.”

People aren’t as scary in real life as they can come across on social media, Power said.

Edwards, of People Before Profit, says that with the current state of housing for asylum seekers, seeking asylum is so dehumanising, and it’s unfair to make life harder for people by portraying the possibility of their mere presence as something scary that can be used as a threat.

When some locals talked about “looking after our own” when he was leafleting them, he wanted to ask them to see that as caring about people they share struggles with, not just a place of birth, he said.

“Is Denis O’Brien our own? Is the developer our own? I feel like I have more in common with the refugees,” he said.