A homeless grandmother in Ireland has been jailed for 16 weeks after she entered a hotel housing Ukrainian refugees and shouted at them. “rapists and criminals”. The woman was looking for shelter, but said there was no room.
Margaret Buttimer appeared at Bandon District Court in County Cork on Thursday, where police told a judge she was called to a disturbance at a hotel in the city in late January.
They remember Buttimer screaming in the lobby “He wanted to know how many Ukrainian citizens were staying in this hotel, how much it cost the Irish, and he said, ‘These Ukrainians are rapists and criminals,'” he said. Irish Times reports.
Police said he backed down and refused to leave the hotel, and that’s what they had “no option” but to stop it.
Butimer was sentenced to six weeks in jail, half of which was suspended on the condition that he stay away from any facility housing Ukrainian refugees.
The 68-year-old has 13 previous convictions, including one for a similar incident at the same hotel in December. The court heard he entered the premises and asked staff “Why do all Ukrainians get a room, and there is no room for me, an Irish citizen?”
Butimer’s previous convictions relate to breaching coronavirus restrictions.
It is not known whether the hotel in Bandon housed migrants from other countries besides Ukrainians. Ireland took in 70,000 refugees from Ukraine and more than 13,000 migrants from other countries last year. The arrival of the latest group, many of whom are men and from the Middle East and Africa, has sparked outrage in the communities where they live.
The influx of migrants came amid record housing shortages in Ireland. House prices and rents have more than doubled in the past decade and there are more than 8,300 homeless people in emergency shelters across the country, according to the latest government figures.
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