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...
Dublin InQuirer •

Gardaí likely knew Kurdish woman, whose body was returned to Turkey, wished to be buried in Ireland

Gardaí referred queries to the Department of Justice, which hasn’t addressed questions about details of the case. A Tesco clubcard dangled from her keys. “I was later informed that the Clubcard was registered to Nilay [Ateşoğlu], date of birth 9th November 1995,” said Garda Patrick O’Neill in a deposition in November 2025. A year before that, on 9 November 2024, Garda O’Neill had been trying to find out more about the woman whose body had been discovered by a hiker on the rocks just below the...
Dublin InQuirer •

Delays in residence permit renewals put lives of non-EU immigrants on hold – again

After a while, they can’t work and can’t travel abroad and return. Robin Jose’s immigration papers had expired by the time his wife got hers renewed, he said, recently. His status is tied to his wife’s. She works in healthcare, said Jose. He reckoned he couldn’t apply to get his own papers without showing an up-to-date Irish Residence Permit (IRP) for his wife, said Jose. In retrospect, he said, he probably should have applied anyway. It took three months for his wife’s IRP to process, said...
Dublin InQuirer •

In Ireland, asking immigrants to weigh in on immigration policies is mostly box-ticking, community organisers say

In other EU countries, though, it seems immigrants are consulted more substantially. When Dutch officials asked other EU member states whether seeking immigrants’ input was part of the process for creating immigration policies, answers varied. It was “personal involvement” of immigrants in the development of “national/ministerial”-level policy, that Dutch officials sought to know about. Some countries, like Italy and Finland, said yes, they include immigrants. Finland has an Advisory Board f...
Dublin InQuirer •

Ruling sheds a small light on opaque intel-gathering on some citizenship seekers

An Garda Síochána “has developed strong links with other security services, particularly those with whom the State shares common threats to national security”, it says. On a summer afternoon last year, a little over 90 people trickled onto a Zoom call. They were all citizens of Pakistan who’d come to speak to the country’s then-ambassador to Ireland, Aisha Farooqi. The people on the call shared a familiar limbo. Most had faced years-long delays for a decision on their citizenship applications...
Dublin InQuirer •

Documenting one man’s unravelling before a deportation flight to Nigeria, observer had to rely on second-hand accounts

“I was advised that one deportee had been restrained in order to have him escorted through airport security.” In June 2025, when immigration officials were deporting several people to Nigeria, one of them had to be restrained. That’s been noted in a report by an observer, who’d turned up “to protect the human rights and dignity of the deportees” by bearing witness. The human rights observer, invited by the Department of Justice, didn’t see what had happened before officials restrained the man...
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