Dundrum House Hotel is a stunning 300-year-old country resort and popular with golfers planning a round at the adjacent County Tipperary Golf and Country Club. But visitors today to the listed four star hotel or the £775-a-year club next door cannot miss that there’s something unusual going on.
The clue comes from the gaggle of protesters living in tents, surrounded by Irish tricolours, and signs declaring ‘Make Ireland Great Again’, ‘Stand With Us Together’ and ‘Save our Hotel’.
While at the magnificent Dundrum House Hotel itself, instead of a cosy welcome, several buildings are fenced off with forbidding red signs warning ‘No unauthorised persons beyond this point’.
And these incongruous notes are there because the golf course, gym and its grand country house hotel have become a fraught focal point for increasingly angry opposition to the Irish government’s controversial national immigration policy.
The row centered around Dundrum began relatively quietly two years ago when a handful of Ukrainian refugees arrived.
Then, last summer, 70 women and children asylum seekers from further afield joined them.
Now, if the Irish government has its way, there will be many, many more to follow, including men.
Indeed the arrivals could soon outnumber the entire population of the village of Dundrum – which stood at just 221 people at the last census.
The stunning 300-year-old country resort, Dundrum House (pictured), has been used to house migrants – and now locals fear new arrivals could outnumber the village’s entire population
Mother-of-one Margaret Gallagher, 50, (pictured) speaks for many when as she voices her objections about the government plan
A gaggle of protesters living in tents, surrounded by Irish tricolours, surrounding the government’s plans for more migrants, including men at the hotel
When the first asylum seekers arrived in August, the villagers pitched their tent and caravan outside and have now maintained the vigil 24/7 for more than 300 days.
And since then the opposition has only intensified.
Two separate legal cases are rumbling through the civil courts with the aim of preventing the hotel being turned into a fully-fledged International Protection Accommodation Scheme (IPAS) centre, housing possibly 300 asylum seekers – or almost 50% more than the village’s own population.
Remarkably, despite the hotel being closed to paying guests, the golf course with its spectacular 18-hole championship course set in verdant Irish countryside has tried to carry on as normal.
And indeed this week we saw a regular trickle of players drive past the protesters, sometimes giving a friendly toot as they do so.
But it doesn’t feel very normal.
The hotel’s Deansgrove steak restaurant is currently closed, but the bar offers BLTs or Pulled Pork Sandwiches at €12.95, beefburgers at €18.50 and Golfers Mixed Grill at €24.95. Over at the gym, an adult 12-month membership is €450 or £380.
But most locals are currently boycotting both.
Mother-of-one Margaret Gallagher, 50, speaks for many when she voices her objections about the government plan: ‘It wasn’t the ideal place for the Ukrainian refugees, but with the asylum seekers, we know nothing about them and I doubt the government do either.
Last August, when the first asylum seekers arrived, the villagers pitched their tent and caravan outside and have now maintained the vigil 24/7 for more than 300 days
A luxurious hotel room at Dundrum House Hotel, which is situated next to a £775-a-year golf club
Currently locals are boycotting the golf club as well as the historic hotel’s Deansgrove steak restaurant – which is currently closed (Pictured: A pool at Dundrum House)
A flurry of protest signs outside the entrance of the establishment, with one reading: ‘Protect our children’
‘We know for a fact the majority of these are economic migrants and we don’t want them in our village.
‘The infrastructure here isn’t up to this – the doctor’s list is full and you couldn’t imagine a worse place to put people who have nothing to do. There are barely 200 of us in the village and they’re talking about putting 300 people here.
‘The hotel was an integral part of the village and brought people into the area who spent money at the few shops in the village.’
To call Dundrum a one-horse town is probably overdoing it with the horses. The single pub, ‘Bertie’s’ used to get a smattering of customers from the hotel, according to local builder Conor Ryan, 65.
‘Whenever people were there for a wedding or a weekend, a few would come down to Bertie’s for a pint of Guinness,’ he said. ‘But that doesn’t happen any longer.
‘The hotel is very much part of the village and to have it given over to house refugees and migrants is plain daft. We’re in the middle of nowhere and while we’re a very welcoming community, there’s no sense in placing people here.’
According to the website, equipment includes: ‘All types of cardio including treadmills, cross trainers, bikes, rowing machine, ski erg and assault bike.’
Local teacher Andrea Crowe, 46, whose parents formerly owned Dundrum House, said on X that the hotel’s change of use left her ‘filled with sadness.’
‘We know for a fact the majority of these are economic migrants and we don’t want them in our village,’ Ms Gallagher (pictured with Conor Ryan) claimed
‘The hotel is very much part of the village and to have it given over to house refugees and migrants is plain daft,’ Connor Ryan (pictured) said
Currently two separate legal cases are rumbling through the civil courts with the aim of preventing the hotel being turned into a fully-fledged International Protection Accommodation Scheme (IPAS) centre
If the hotel becomes an IPAS centre it could possibly 300 asylum seekers – or almost 50% more than the village’s own population (Pictured: The neighbouring golf course)
A spacious and lavish reception area inside Dundrum House, where nearby protesting has only intensified over the course of 300 days
Another room inside the the 300-year-old hotel, where more migrants are set to live if the Irish government has its way
‘How can our government not engage properly with us’ she asked.
She said the move raised concerns over housing, health and education provision for the community.
The number of immigrants entering Ireland in the year to April 2024 was the highest since 2007, with 149,200 people arriving.
At the same time, the 5.3million population in Ireland rose by 98,700 people, the largest 12-month increase since 2008.
There have been many protests, sometimes violent, against immigration, including a riot in Dublin in November 2023, described by the Gardai as the most violent in modern Dublin history.
It was sparked by the stabbing of three young children and a care assistant outside a primary school in the city. The suspect, Algerian-born Riad Bouchaker, 50, faces charges of attempted murder.
Nora O’Dwyer’s family runs the local hardware store, PP O’Dwyers, and said that when the first Ukrainian refugees were housed in the hotel, the owner, American businessman Jeffrey Leo, 54, told locals that he had big plans for the hotel and its grounds, mentioning a distillery, for example.
‘But nothing came of that, and instead we got wind that he was bringing in the IPAS asylum seekers which made people angry,’ said Mrs O’Dwyer, 65.
Local teacher Andrea Crowe, 46, whose parents formerly owned Dundrum House, said on X that the hotel’s change of use left her ‘filled with sadness’
Over the last 300 days protesting has only intensified outside Dundrum Hotel in County Tipperary (Pictured: Garda as well as a bus near the entrance)
Pictured left: A Garda van arriving to protests near the hotel, Pictured right: ‘Gardai stand watch as the protests continue outside the Irish hotel’
‘It’s a historic building and completely the wrong choice to be housing people in small rural community like this.’
Her words clearly cut little ice with the hotel’s owner Mr Leo, who she claimed verbally abused her when he passed her at the protest last autumn, then hurled a metal sign at her.
She reported him to the Garda, and Mr Leo has denied the allegation.
Mr Leo appears to be no stranger to legal challenges.
A former broker with Morgan Stanley in the US, he was permanently barred by the United States Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), for having failed to ‘respond to FINRA requests for information for alleged violations of outside business activities and private securities transactions.’
He now lives in spectacular Tullamaine Castle in Tipperary, but faces a civil Commercial Court case over accusations of misappropriating some of $60m given to him by multi-millionaires Mary and James Wenning, who operate a chicken farming business in Ohio. (Hence one of the wittier new signs posted at the hotel entrance, proclaiming ‘The Plot Chickens’.
Mr Leo has denied the claims.
At the same time, the local Dundrum Heritage Group (DHG) has been granted leave to pursue a Judicial Review in the High Court next month over a planning decision by Tipperary County Council over change of use of the hotel for one of Mr Leo’s companies, Brogan Capital Ventures Ltd, which received €5.5million from the Irish government between 2022 and 2024 for providing accommodation.
Local protesters drill a board which reads ‘Support Dundrum’ near road signage
A group of locals on the picket lines outside the hotel, as placards emerging from cones read: ‘Peaceful protest’
But setting aside the immigration argument per se, there’s also the fairness aspect. Local builder Martin Barry, 47, said his daughter, 18, who just left school, missed much of her final year because she lost her place on the school bus, meaning it was near-impossible to make the 15km journey.
‘It happens to a lot of young people around here,’ he told MailOnline, ‘But every day the children of the Ukrainian refugees and the IPAS migrants are taken from here on two separate minibuses to the same school my daughter attended.
‘When we asked if she could go on one of their buses, we got short shrift. Where’s the fairness in that, when I’m paying my taxes for someone from another country to be bussed to school, yet my own daughter is denied the same privilege?’
Secretary Karen Horgan, 44, vehemently denies that local people’s opposition to the reception centre is fuelled by racism.
‘We’ve heard it all,’ she said. ‘But it’s not about that. I’ve spoken to many of the people housed there, Ukrainian and IPAS migrants, and I’m very sympathetic to them – and I’ve helped them myself.
‘But it’s just the wrong place for them, and most of all, we want our hotel back as an attraction that brings tourists and visitors to the area, who spend money. ‘
Strolling down virtually the only street in Dundrum, I bump into Ukrainian pensioners Volodymyr Kravchenko, 69, and his wife Lyudmila Ivanenko, 70.
Pictured: Nora Ryan – one of the protesters outside of Dundrum House
Ukrainian pensioners Volodymyr Kravchenko and Lydmjla Ivanenko (pictured) said via Google Translate that the Irish had ‘been so kind’ to them
They arrived here in April 2004 from Kyiv and tell me (via Google translate) that the ‘Irish people have been so kind to us.
‘For ten months we stayed in the hotel, but now we have been moved out to other accommodation,’ said Lyudmila.
‘For the younger people, it would probably be better to be in a city with more job opportunities, but we like it here because it’s so quiet and the scenery is so beautiful.’
The Irish Government’s Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth was contacted for comment. Mr Leo was also contacted for comment.
A spokesman for the Department of Integration told MailOnline that it had ‘Received an offer from a provider to provide international protection accommodation at this location following the end of the contract for those fleeing the war in Ukraine, and the Department is considering that offer.
‘No further details can be provided while this assessment is ongoing. All offers of accommodation have to be assessed but not all are deemed appropriate or suitable.
‘The relocations of Ukraine residents from this property are currently under pause, and the Department will keep residents and the provider informed about next steps.’
