Dublin InQuirer •

Dozens of people from Gaza seeking visas to study in Ireland are denied entry

It was Haneen Eshraim's only “realistic opportunity at this stage to leave Gaza safely and continue my education”, she said. Before the war started, Haneen Eshraim, an English teacher in Gaza, was hustling as hard as she could, she said, recently. “I worked in a school during the day while also running my own private English teaching centre,” Eshraim said. She wanted to make her own money and be independent, she said. Eshraim was born and raised in Gaza. “I have lived here my entire life.” S...
Dublin InQuirer •

Mention of “best interests of the child” quietly dropped from Department of Justice’s new family reunification policy

A spokesperson for Ireland’s Ombudsman for Children said it is “very concerned” that the best-interests principle was not referenced in the new policy. On 12 June, the Department of Justice officially rolled out its fresh family-reunification rules. These govern whether someone settled in Ireland can bring family members to live with them, and if so, which ones, and under which conditions. The changes affected the rights of Irish citizens, people from outside the European Economic Area (EEA)...
Dublin InQuirer •

Echoing the Trump administration, some Dublin politicians push campaign against Somali immigrants

"To be honest, it is really disappointing," says Abdi Farhan Hassan. They tried to laugh about it, said Abdi Farhan Hassan, recently. “But to be honest, it is really disappointing,” he said, sitting at a city centre café wearing shorts and a T-shirt. It was kind of funny that they couldn’t come up with a new charge and had to borrow Trump’s against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, said Hassan. “You know, they’re eating the dogs; they’re eating the cats.” Hassan was talking about reac...
Dublin InQuirer •

Fingal County Council hasn’t had an integration strategy in nearly two years

It, like Dublin City Council, has been waiting years for a new national policy, before it renews its local integration policy. It only crossed his mind recently, said Paul Mulville, a Social Democrats councillor on Fingal County Council. For Monday's monthly meeting of the council, “I was gonna ask the manager about, you know, what the plan is,” he said by phone on Friday afternoon. Mulville was talking about how he’d recently noticed that the council’s last “Migrant Integration and Social Co...
Dublin InQuirer •

Amid delays with permit renewals, an immigrant doctor in Ireland can't travel to visit his seriously ill mother

The fix for the backlogged system? “It has to be more people assigned to it,” says Colm Burke, the Fine Gael TD. In January, Rehman Faryal’s parents travelled to Ireland for a visit, he said, recently. Two weeks after they went back to their country of birth, his mum called. She had been diagnosed with advanced-stage breast cancer, said Faryal. Faryal, who’s a hospital doctor, planned to go on leave to be by her side, he said. At the same time, both Faryal and his wife were in the process of...
Dublin InQuirer •

Even as Ireland gets harsher with people seeking asylum, anti-immigrant groups rail against new asylum law

Academics and politicians say that’s because, for a small cohort, there’s an existential risk in admitting to their audience that the rules have hardened. “High-quality information videos” walk applicants through the initial asylum process, the Department of Justice has said. And “legal clerks” are available in drop-in clinics to answer specific questions, they said. That is a new practice under the International Protection Act 2026, which carried over tenets of the EU Migration and Asylum Pa...
Dublin InQuirer •

In Stoneybatter, an annual tour of local cats – from the gentle giant to the chicken thief

Those joining the cat crawl got a map marked with the cats' locations and names across nearly 20 households. On Saturday morning, a man crouched on the ground on Ostman Place in Stoneybatter, shaking cat snacks out of a packet. He was trying to lure his cat, Lucozade, from under a car. The kitty had visitors. The attention had thrown him a little, said his owner. A lanky black-and-white kitty, Lucozade, poked his head out. He sniffed the treats, then tucked in, and a handful of visitors went...
Dublin InQuirer •

Gardaí’s budget for PR and communications has boomed. Is that good?

It depends on how its used, say academics who study policing – on what kinds of interventions and stories are pushed. An Garda Síochána's spend on PR grew nearly sixfold between 2019 and 2026, show figures released under the Freedom of Information Act. During that period, the annual budgets of its Corporate Communications Office (CCO) grew from €62,000 to €358,000. Gardaí also bulked up the press office’s staffing, from 19 members in December 2019 to 31 in April 2026 – an increase of 63 perce...
Dublin InQuirer •

Department of Foreign Affairs won’t release internal records on ICE deportation flights via Shannon

“If they need to redact security information, then by all means, redact it, but not releasing any documents at all doesn’t instil confidence in the system here.” The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has refused to release 205 pages of documents, relating to the United States’ use of Shannon Airport as a stopover on its flights to deport immigrants. The United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has used Shannon Airport to refuel its planes on the way to send people forcibly to...
Dublin InQuirer •

Risk that more survivors of torture wil be denied asylum in Ireland, as a vital service is frozen

While the pace of the asylum process has picked up for many applicants, the services helping them to make their cases have lacked the resourcing to keep up Spirasi, the national centre for survivors of torture, is “temporarily pausing” its “medico-legal” referral service, it has said in an email to asylum lawyers. Solicitors used to refer clients who said they had endured physical or psychological torture to Spirasi to examine their wounds and issue findings in a medico-legal report. That cou...
Dublin InQuirer •

A woman sees herself through a lengthy stay in immigration limbo with help from open mics, group therapy

“Most men process their feelings faster,” Jaishree Malik said, on stage, of her eight-month-long wait. The joke met with peals of laughter. On a recent Tuesday evening, the dingy basement of Pawn Shop, the bar on Dame Street, was crowded and bustling. Nervous comics were huddling in the back, studying their material. It was a comedy open mic – but there was no microphone in sight. Participants had to fill the room with their own voices. At one point, the roar of a vacuum cleaner out the door...
Dublin InQuirer •

Still hurt by Bertie Ahern singling out Congolese people, loss of a community member opened a fresh wound, they say

“It’s literally George Floyd on the streets of Dublin. I can’t believe that scene and that guy with his knee on his neck.” It reminded him of George Floyd, pinned to the ground and dying under the knee of a cop on the streets of Minneapolis, said Jude Hughes, a Black Irish community activist. “It’s literally George Floyd on the streets of Dublin. I can’t believe that scene and that guy with his knee on his neck,” he said, in a Zoom meeting on Monday night. The emergency meeting was organised...
Dublin InQuirer •

Gardaí press charges against a man for a poster on the gates of Iranian embassy

Morteza Najafi wedged the anti-Khamenei poster by the railings during a peaceful protest in Blackrock, late last month. Morteza Najafi grabbed his phone and played a video. It shows the moment on 26 April when he crossed the street and placed a poster on the gates of the Iranian embassy on Mount Merrion Avenue in Blackrock. As he strides over to the other side, he smiles and flashes a peace sign to other protesters, the video shows. The poster featured an upside-down photo of Ali Khamenei, t...
Dublin InQuirer •

A new film carefully explores the interpersonal toll of falling for hate

“What I tried to do was that two different people could watch this movie, and have two different reactions,” said director Alan Hopkins. Sometimes it happens when you’re grabbing coffee with an old friend, said Alan Hopkins recently. “And they just mention some, like, mad thing that you can’t believe that’s where they’re at, you know what I mean?” Or it’s your loving partner or spouse. Someone you thought you knew better than anybody, he said. In A Knock At Your Door – Hopkins’s latest short...
Dublin InQuirer •

Do Gardaí have the power to inspect ICE deportation flights that stop in Shannon?

People in Ireland have been calling the guards and asking them to search these flights from the US to see if everyone on board is being treated okay. On 16 April, Melina Sharp got wind that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation flight from the United States sat in Shannon Airport to refuel. She called Ennis Garda station, said Sharp, recently. “I asked, ‘Are you guys going to search it? It’s likely that there are people on it shackled.’” The officer got “defensive”, she sai...
Dublin InQuirer •

Short-notice postponement of citizenship ceremony upended some people's plans. Could it have been avoided?

The prospect of Andrea Manning’s daughter travelling abroad for an internship hinged on the idea that she was going to be an Irish citizen in mid-April, said Manning. Manning’s daughter – who’s 20 years old – had landed a work placement in the Netherlands through the Erasmus scheme, said her mum. The programme offers a pathway to European young people to “study, train, gain experience, and volunteer abroad”, says the EU Commission website. The placement was going to start on 1 July. Manning’s...
Dublin InQuirer •

A woman and her child signed up for “voluntary return” – a homeless shelter in Mauritius was their option

She and her young son sought asylum in Ireland. But besides a brief victory at the court, their case has passed through a carousel of rejections. Talat Ogeer sounded exhausted. She was calling from a hospital. She’s 22 weeks pregnant, and she’s been bleeding, said Ogeer, last month. “I’m waiting for a doctor, I don’t know what’s happening inside of me,” she said. In 2021, Ogeer sold her jewellery and borrowed money from friends to afford travelling to Europe with her son, who was then four y...
Dublin InQuirer •

In radio in Ireland, the “accent ceiling” persists

On volunteer-run community radio, there’s room for people with all kinds of accents – but it’s rare to move beyond that. An announcer with an Irish accent says the next show is presented by “Hussain Bakhshi, who is originally from Afghanistan, but is now living in Ireland”. A soft voice with a different twang is next. “Hello everyone, welcome to Home for All, with me, Hussain Bakhshi, and I would like to say for you, Happy Nowruz today and Eid Mubarak,” he said on a 22 March show. He then in...
Dublin InQuirer •

Documents say asylum law centre was in “unprecedented crisis”. The Legal Aid Board tried to hide this with redactions.

A spokesperson for the board said it redacted accounts that weren’t “evidence-based” and had not tried to “hide or trivialise the scale of any crisis”. In mid-2025, Anne McShane – then a lawyer at the Legal Aid Board’s Cork North asylum law centre – found herself struggling to navigate a tower of cases, she said recently. “I was having panic attacks and I couldn’t sleep,” said McShane by phone, on Thursday. McShane was struggling because at the time she and one other solicitor were the only o...
Dublin InQuirer •

Trained teachers of in-demand subjects shut out of jobs because of where adverts are posted

Schools don’t advertise vacancies on platforms the Department of Employment requires for its work permit process for those from outside the EEA. Even before she enrolled in an education course in Ireland, Navjot Arora was a teacher in India, she said, recently. “For me it’s like, when you teach, you learn something from younger people, right?” said Arora, sitting at a city centre café. After finishing a master’s course at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), she got a job teaching at a post-primary...
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