Dancing With The Stars judge Arthur Gourounlian admits he feels sick if he watches anti-refugee protests across the city.
The Armenian-born choreographer revealed for the first time in 2020 about how his family were forced into a Belgian refugee when their lives were threatened by Azerbaijani military before he was a teenager.
He previously told us: “They were trying to kill all the Armenians and we had to escape because it was so dangerous.
“I nearly died because it was essentially a war of ethnic cleansing.”
The father-of-one reacted to protests over the housing of refugees at a hotel in Ballymun, Dublin – saying it makes him too sick if he watches the video clips online.
“I haven’t really see it. It will upset me. I can see things because it’ll bring me back to when I was young so it is triggering in my head, so I don’t really…. Because I really get sick. It brings so many bad memories, so I haven’t really followed that," he said at RTE's Feel good motivation morning on Wednesday.
Arthur previously told us about his journey as a refugee, admitting he still has nightmares about his experiences in the 1990s when his family's lives were in danger.
“It’s hard for me to talk about this as it triggers something in me. I have this recurring dream that I am back in Armenia in the conflict.
“I was 12 at the time of the conflict. We left in 1993 in October, and we arrived in Belgium in 1994.
“It took us about three months to leave Armenia. We never flew, it was all trains - train after train. My sister was standing there and someone gave her money in a station, we looked so poor. We went to a refugee centre in the heart of Brussels called Le Petit Chateau.”
Once they made it to Brussels, the family were moved into a refugee camp and then a temporary house.
Arthur’s comments come in the wake of Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien saying he is "very disturbed" by the anti-refugee protests.
Mr O'Brien said that having seen some of the videos of the protests he feels that while "people have a right to protest ... they don't have a right to intimidate people".
"We've been a welcoming country, rightly so. We know from our own history what it's like to have to leave our own shores, due to oppression, due to war, due to famine.
"The vast majority of people living here support our efforts to look after people from Ukraine and people from other countries who are fleeing persecution. So it concerns me to see that," said Mr O'Brien.
"If people have a differing viewpoint, they are entitled to that, but they're not entitled to intimidate people," he said at the time.
The Lord Mayor of Dublin Caroline Conroy described the protests as "embarrassing" and insisted that they are not representative of the views of many people and organisations in the area.
Speaking on RTÉ's Today with Claire Byrne, Ms Conroy, who is from Ballymun, said: "It's really embarrassing. It's upsetting. It's not what we're about in Ballymun".
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