Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo, may be a hub of religious diversity, but not everyone has found integration easy, writes Kathy Sheridan
A few minutes drive from Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo, up a side-road through patchworks of small, marshy fields, John Cunnane, a likeable, 59-year-old dairy farmer, has finished milking his 60 cows. In the soft-spoken, patient style of a man used to defending himself, he explains why he will not vote, or celebrate birthdays or smoke a legal drug like nicotine - though he enjoys a glass of wine on occasion - and why he believes there is no such thing as a just war.
In his wellingtons and working clothes, he may not fit the stereotype of a Jehovah's Witness, but his certainty is powerful.
It helps that we are standing beside a monument to his beliefs, the brand new Kingdom Hall, a cement-block building conjured up in 72 hours.
In a country where a builder who manages to complete a house in five months is idolised, the fact that this 100-seater, 175 square metre hall - with fully-working electrics, heating, air conditioning, gleaming paintwork, oak and teak joinery, garden shed and 120 metre long garden wall - took three days to construct, surely constitutes some kind of modern miracle.
But for the Witnesses, this "quick build" affair - organising and providing for a 250-strong multi-skilled crew for a three day blitz - is routine. They've already "quick built" 50 halls in Ireland.
In Ballyhaunis, the presiding overseer, Steven Naylor, and his congregation acquired the site and the funding - 150,000 in total including 110,000 of an interest-free loan from the Watchtower Society - and with the help of the Witnesses' expert regional building committee, assembled all in readiness for last weekend.
The foundations were dug in May by a Ballindine-born Witness who travelled from England. The timber frame was built on site the week before. Come the weekend, when the rain lashed into the fresh plaster, the tradesmen and women did not slope off. They simply covered in the area and started again.
No worker gets paid but each gets a bed and plenty of good food. Tim Tully, an Englishman living here for 15 years, supervised bed and board, hunting down 200 sleeping spaces, 500 eggs, 60lbs of rashers and 60lbs of sausages, 250 litres of milk, 80lbs of mince and diced beef, 500 chicken portions and 5,000 buns and fruit pie portions.
Steven Naylor's wife Yvonne mucked in to clean the toilets, kept the site safe, peeled sacks of potatoes and did the washing-up.
You think three days is efficient? Ha! Tully reminisces about similar jobs in England where crews working without sleep completed the job in two.
The English-born Naylors are full-time ministers, with previous lengthy stints in Connemara and Nenagh, and are in the category of "special pioneers".
Having no children of their own leaves them free to move around and do the recommended 130 hours of house-calls a month, for which they get a small "reimbursement" from the Watchtower Society. They supplement this income with cleaning jobs, working on factory floors in Connemara and the windows of TG4, and earning a total income of around 14,000.
Their four-year stay in Ballyhaunis has seen the congregation grow from 19 baptised members to 29, plus a dozen children. It may be significant that only about a third of this congregation is Irish-born.
But it's the fact of their presence at all in such a "traditional" area that fascinates many.
Their faith takes its rules from a literal reading of the Bible. Their ultimate aim is for a theocracy. So apart from having no truck with blood transfusions or black pudding, they do not believe in the Trinity, or the repetition of prayer, or the veneration of Mary. Yet their congregation has survived and even grown just a few miles down the road from the Marian shrine at Knock.
The Naylors insist they have never encountered "overt" hostility in their 19 years in Ireland, just something called "the village mentality" which, says Steven, "has started to break down".
Can such acceptance be linked to the fact the avowedly multicultural town of Ballyhaunis is just four miles away on the other side? That's a moot point.
It may be 24 years since John Cunnane "resigned" from the Catholic church by writing to the Bishop of Tuam - locals still recall the pulpit-thumping that named nobody but conveyed a damning message - but it is more than 30 years since a Pakistani Muslim, Sher Mohammad Rafique, arrived in Ballyhaunis and could find no room at any inn, at any price. He ended up living in a "shed" next to the meat factory he had bought, he now says.
And thus did the town become host to a small trickle of Pakistanis and Syrians, not to mention the State's first mosque, long before Ireland dreamt of something called immigration.
When Rafique's halal meat factory folded in 1992 and he left the country the Muslim population amounted to no more than 20 people. But some schoolchildren at least had seen each other close up; one young local recalls a children's birthday party where the Muslim hostess suddenly prostrated herself to pray: "You wouldn't bat an eyelid at anything after that."
By the time Rafique returned in 2000, the number of Muslims had soared, although there is no consensus on numbers. Appalled by the over-crowded, shanty-like living conditions of many who had settled in the exclusively Muslim complex beside the mosque, he sent out a questionnaire. This suggests, he says, that there are 350 to 400 Muslims in the area, with 162 of them under 15 years old. This figure, he says, represents between 20 and 25 per cent of the population, "depending on which village you leave in or out".
Meanwhile, he has a €5 million house-building project in train within the existing complex - totally financed with his wife's land and money, including funds from a house she mortgaged in London - and designed, he says, simply to provide decent homes for Muslims for about 70 per cent of the normal price. He merely hopes to break even, he says.
According to Rafique, permission has been secured for 41 houses, and he hopes to build 85 in total. Meanwhile, he is proceeding with a €250,000 plan to renovate and extend the mosque, build a mortuary and acquire a burial ground and playing field.
Locally, reaction is strangely muted. Despite the obvious squalor of some current homes in the complex, there is no involvement from local groups in the building project. Furthermore, in a small population of about 1,400, his figures are hotly disputed. "He talks as if the Muslims are taking over the town," said one frowning woman, adding his figure to the approximately 50 asylum seekers/ refugees accommodated in the old convent plus about 220 workers from Eastern Europe (without whom, she agrees, local businesses would find it difficult to function). "It's just that sometimes I think, the local people feel just a bit overwhelmed."
Perhaps the most surprising aspect is how few locals - including people who live on the same road - have been through the gate and in to the Muslim complex. A young fellow-Muslim of Syrian origin in the town can claim to have Irish friends, but cannot name a Pakistani friend in Ballyhaunis.
Though generally acknowledged to be warm and gracious, there is no doubt that the Pakistani Muslims of Ballyhaunis are a closed, self-sufficient group. Nobody, not even Rafique, believes there has been integration between the two communities. But neither is there conflict, everyone insists.
"It \ didn't happen," says a local businessman briskly. "Nobody thinks about it."
Then again, he says, look at the Irish of a few decades ago, in their ghettos across England and the US - were they any different? "Give it 10 years," says Rafique.
If Ballyhaunis proves anything, it is that nobody holds all the answers. Perhaps for now an absence of conflict is enough.