Community spirit is alive in Ballyhaunis

"Our fear was that we were heading to becoming a satellite town of Claremorris, which is 12 miles down the road. Claremorris would have attracted larger superstores like Tesco, but I think we’ve got to it in time to prevent that happening.

“So it is up to us as a community to get that community spirit back into our town and to look at further developing it,” says local auctioneer John Higgins, who is a committee member of Go Ballyhaunis.

Four weeks before Irish Country Living met John, there were about 750 people at a local white-collar boxing fundraiser in Ballyhaunis and local solicitor Evan O’Dwyer recognised the amount of good local business heads that were in attendance.

“He got a few of us together after that to see would we be interested in forming a group,” explains Johns. And so Go Ballyhaunis was born. The initiative is an outward promotion looking at inward investment, as the town tries to attract Ballyhaunis investment from diaspora all over the world.

A great start

When we met up with John, the four-week-old initiative had seen 61 different businesses attend its fifth meeting. In all, 1,500 car stickers launched the week before were gone, and Go Ballyhaunis had been lined up to feature in none other than The New York Times.

On Mayo Day (30 April), “Operation Transformation Ballyhaunis” was launched in association with Fleetwood Paints to rejuvenate the town. John says they are trying “to put the heart back into Ballyhaunis”.

“There were family-run businesses that were in the main street 20 years ago with families living overhead,” says John.

“That population died away and moved on, and these properties came up for sale in the boom times. People came in from outside and bought up these premises as investment properties. However, a lot of these businesses closed down.

“Now, one building in the square has been identified in our group as our focal point. We’re going to start at the square and work out.”

Getting social for a change

Go Ballyhaunis also identified that business people in the town weren’t using social media to promote what they do.

John references two of the town’s agricultural machinery manufacturers. Cashels Engineering is exporting into Nordic countries, while Major Equipment International Ltd exports into Europe and beyond.

“Up to four weeks ago – I’ve lived all my life in Ballyhaunis and I’m a business man in Ballyhaunis – I wasn’t aware of that!” exclaims John.

John says the residential units in Ballyhaunis are “absolutely flying out the door at the minute”. He says the investment market is looking at the town “because there’s massive employment”.

John mentions local businesses and employers such as Western Brand chicken, Homecare Medical Supplies, Keane Kitchens and Gurteen Kitchens and the Big Red Barn in Aughamore, while Dawn Meats is the largest employer in this area.

When Dawn bought the plant from Avonmore in 1999 (Avonmore in turn had bought it from Sher Rafiq in 1992) there were 200 employees. There are now 450. Despite all of these jobs, there still may not be jobs for everyone.

“What we’re noticing about the Pakistani community especially –when they’re going away to college – and they’re highly educated people – is that they’re not tending to come back to Ballyhaunis.” says John.

He says the community is keen to show there are both job and sports opportunities in Ballyhaunis and this is something the GAA club’s integration officer will be looking at.

John acknowledges that what Ballyhaunis is probably lacking in this regard is an IT sector.

Dawn meats: a €4m commitment

One company that certainly has jobs for non-nationals – which relies on them, in fact, is Dawn Meats. “There are about seven big players here for a small community, so the workforce isn’t there generally, irrespective of the type of work,” says David O’Flynn, group CSR manager with Dawn Meats.

Its workforce is comprised of approximately 160-170 Irish, 100 Slovakian, over 80 from the Czech Republic, and 30 from each of Poland, Croatia and Pakistan. Then there are about 10-20 each of Lithuanian, Romanian and Bulgarian, along with other nationalities.

An English language course was set up on site and the company publishes many of its documents in several languages.

David says there wasn’t a workforce available during the Celtic Tiger, so Dawn developed a relationship with a recruiter in the Czech Republic. And the plant still has jobs across all areas.

“Because of the size of the business you’ll always be looking for people,” says David. Dawn invested €13m in its Ballyhaunis plant in 2007-08 and €4m last year. “That €4m is a commitment to the town,” says David.

School ties

The economic future of Ballyhaunis looks bright, but what about social cohesion? The town’s one secondary school is home to 30 nationalities. “It’s something we value in the school,” says principal David McDonagh. “It prepares students for wider society.

“Students are coming from war-torn countries, we have to ensure that they can adapt as quickly as possible. They are wrenched out of a comfortable existence through no fault of their own. Then there are other families who don’t have those traumatic issues but for whom language is an issue.”

According to Fr Stephen Farragher, in the primary school Scoil Íosa, approximately 60% of the children speak a language other than English as their first spoken language when they go home from school.

He makes the interesting point that “in the 1970s and 1980s, when the immigrant community was smaller, there was a greater need to learn English and to integrate with the host community. Nowadays, because the numbers have grown so much, there isn’t the same perceived need for the adults to do this.”

Language and culture issues

The secondary school has put in place a TEFL course but would love more support for these students. “It puts a lot of pressure on students and resources if they come in at 16 with no English – and students don’t just turn up in schools in September or October,” says David McDonagh.

Another challenge to integration noted by Fr Stephen Farragher is “when elements of the immigrant community regard the influence of the surrounding culture as having a largely negative influence, especially on their children”.

He goes on to explain: “In Ireland, as in western culture, women are regarded as having equal status to men. While in some non-western cultures, the woman’s role is largely subordinate to that of the man.”

He notes: “While there is an onus on the host community to welcome and make every effort to help, immigrants need to at least have a knowledge and respect for the values of the host community.”

Fr Stephen says locals can learn from these cultures in other ways. “For example, the extent to which social life in Ireland revolves around the pub and the consumption of alcohol. This is something that Muslims, in particular, find difficult to comprehend.”

David McDonagh agrees: “Muslim students are very well integrated, they play hurling and football, but it can become an issue later in life when kids start socialising, and strict Muslim rules become apparent.”

On whether the wearing of hijabs or long beards, often sported by Muslim men, conflict with the uniform code, David says school authorities have no problem with the hijab and there are as many Irish pupils as Muslims sporting beards these days. He simply requests all students keep them neat and tidy.

A matter of planning

Fr Stephen contends that greater orientation and planning is needed in the town. “I read recently that in Germany, where many communities are facing the same challenges with integration, there seems to be better planning.”

Better planning wouldn’t go astray at all, especially with regard to our direct provision services. Life in Ballyhaunis is very different for those living in the Direct Provision Centre in the old convent.

“For this particular group, integration presents a significant challenge because it’s an institutionalised way of living,” says Natalia Pestova, co-ordinator with Mayo Intercultural Action. ]

She says one of the criticisms of direct provision centres is that people are staying there for up to 10 years, and that some of the previous Ballyhaunis residents thought they were going to live there forever.

She points to the mental-health impact of the system. “You see people depressed, you see people who don’t wake up until 12 o’clock, they cannot work, they’ve no motivation to do anything, so they’re literally left to themselves and it’s a really bad place to be.”

Those left behind

Manar Cherbatji is a Syrian lady who arrived in the 1980s, when her family set up sausage casing business Iman Casings in the town, and she is very involved in the community.

However, integration is the least of her worries at the moment and she is primarily concerned about her family members that are still left in Aleppo.

Manar also says she and her fellow Syrians in Ballyhaunis worry about what the Irish will think of their people and their home country when they see reports on television about ISIS.

This all just underlines how apt Fr Stephen Farragher’s words are when he says: “Underlying the challenges posed by integration is the need to discover our common humanity.”

This is one town rallying all efforts to make Ballyhaunis a great place to live – for all its residents.