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...
Dublin InQuirer •

Refugees waiting on citizenship decisions find the rules have quietly changed

While they heard about harsher policies brought in last year, this change wasn't announced, and affects people who applied before then. In May 2025, Emrul Emon – who had been granted refugee status in February 2024 – applied for Irish citizenship. He didn’t hire a lawyer, he said, because he reckoned his application was straightforward. “I did everything myself.” But since a couple of weeks ago, when he heard back from the Department of Justice’s citizenship unit, he has wondered if he needs...
Dublin InQuirer •

Seeking a few more months to steady their immigration status, some university graduates fall undocumented and lose jobs

Since June, there’s been a shift in how the Department of Justice has ruled on these applications – more rejections, says immigration solicitor Imran Khurshid. Manasa Rayaji came to Ireland to study, finished her master’s in marketing at Dublin Business School, and then set about looking for a company that would sponsor a work permit so she could stay on. With the end of her grace time nearing, she applied in September to the Department of Justice for a little more time to job-hunt – but hasn’...
Dublin InQuirer •

Chatbots considered for providing legal counselling to people seeking asylum, documents suggest

The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission doesn’t believe chatbots are suitable “in provision of legal counselling”, a spokesperson said. Last autumn, officials at the Legal Aid Board (LAB) toiled to knit together a plan to offer “legal counselling” to people seeking asylum under a new law, show documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. They went back and forth with civil servants at the Department of Justice about how to fund the service, trying to work out the logistics o...
Dublin InQuirer •

Amid attacks from the right on “NGOs”, trust in Ireland’s charities has been declining

Scandals in some charities have also harmed the reputation of the sector as a whole, which is unfair, people working for other nonprofits say. Last summer, the political leaders of the European Parliament voted to embed a “scrutiny working group” in the EU Commission’s budgetary control committee to audit funding for non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The European People’s Party (EPP), which Fine Gael is a member of, floated the idea. The European Conservatives and Reformists supported it...
Dublin InQuirer •

Minister plans to make it much tougher for Ukrainian refugees to become Irish citizens

Andrii Stepanov says some people don’t want to return to what was once their home, and is now Russian territory. “Why are they pushing us to Russia?” In the nearly four years that he’s lived in Ireland, Denis Henesky has taught himself its laws and politics, weathered an eviction, made new connections and found a path to education, he says. “Everyone said, ‘integrate, integrate, integrate,’” said Henesky, resting his hands on a cane. Gradually, he’s come to realise that tallying his experienc...
Dublin InQuirer •

There’s been a surge in ethics complaints about Dublin city councillors

The numbers spiked after a new cohort of councillors was elected in June 2024, and have eased somewhat since then – while remaining higher than before. In just three months in 2024, while the current cohort of councillors was still new, nearly 100 complaints about councillors’ conduct were sent to Dublin City Council, show council figures. That’s almost 24 times as many grievances as all of 2o23, when only four were lodged. Generally, reports of councillors' alleged unethical conduct have sig...
Dublin InQuirer •

DFA argued that releasing feedback on decision to label Algeria as “safe” would hurt diplomatic relations

“It’s probably fair to assume that if the DFA said anything positive about Algeria’s human rights record, they wouldn’t be so determined to withhold it.” In late 2023, when officials in the Department of Justice were chewing over plans to earmark Algeria as a “safe” country, they sought the opinion of counterparts in the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). When a country is designated as safe, asylum officers assume cases filed by its citizens aren't genuine. People seeking asylum from that...
Dublin InQuirer •

Mourning the loss of Bill Abom, lifelong champion of justice for overlooked immigrant workers

“We remember the work which you believed deeply in, and all of the people who were recipients of your efforts for change, one case at a time.” A trade union flag bobbed in the air as people clustered around a wooden coffin outside the Church of the Good Shepherd on Nutgrove Avenue, last week. The crowd was letting go of Bill Abom, union man and a social justice campaigner who devoted his life to making immigrant workers feel seen by mobilising them to speak up and unshoulder their pain. At th...
Dublin InQuirer •

Parking problems outside the masjid on South Circular Road are used to talk trash about Muslims, councillor says

But there’s only so much the masjid can do to police people’s bad parking – and it’s not just masjid-goers, it’s everybody, says Fazel Ryklief. On Friday at noon, strings of cars lined a stretch of South Circular Road in Dublin 8. Outside the street’s Dublin Mosque, and on the nearby avenues, there are more tight huddles of automobiles. A few traffic cones stood on the pavement outside the masjid, seemingly to combat footpath parking. Before Jumma prayers started that day, the imam brought u...
Dublin InQuirer •

Who will offer early-stage legal help to people seeking asylum in future, speedier process? It might not be lawyers

The new EU Migration and Asylum Pact allows for “legal counselling”. Those who give it won’t have to be “qualified lawyers”, says the Department of Justice. What’s the “extent of individual legal advice” offered to people seeking asylum right now? And what about next year, under the new EU Migration and Asylum Pact? Those were among the questions Luxembourgish officials asked other European Union member states in July, via the European Migration Network. By October, 26 countries had responded...
Dublin InQuirer •

Was the Department of Justice using experimental chatbots to give immigration advice?

“The public should not be used as guinea pigs, particularly vulnerable groups in a legal process which could be impacted by a chatbot giving an incorrect answer.” Department of Justice chatbots to answer questions about asylum and citizenship were developed via a “pre-commercial initiative” that was “aimed at supporting the early stages of developing new technologies and products”. That’s according to Enterprise Ireland, in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act by Kris Shr...
Dublin InQuirer •

As government support for sheltering Ukrainian refugees dwindles, finding somewhere to live means taking more risks

“I understand now how valuable it is to help each other. How important it is to have a roof over your head, to have community.” Oleksandr Kisil pulls up a WhatsApp conversation with a recent ex-landlord on his phone. He’s a refugee from Ukraine, 21, and studies film in Ballyfermot College. He has a moustache and a mushroom haircut, like Jack in Titanic. And he’s warm, chatty and bubbly, small-talks with strangers. His favourite drink at Café Nero on O’Connell Street is strawberry matcha with...
Dublin InQuirer •

People with darker skin over-represented among crime victims, new survey suggests

The City Centre Crime Victim Survey was commissioned by Dublin Inquirer and carried out by Amarách Research. People of colour were over-represented among people who reported having been victims of insults, abuse, and crime in Dublin city centre in the previous 12 months, in a new survey. In a sample of 600 people who responded to our City Centre Crime Victim Survey, only 80 respondents said they have darker skin tones. That’s 13 percent. But this group, who said they had skin tones ranging fr...
Dublin InQuirer •

On Hardwicke Lane, a tiny masjid faces hostility and xenophobia, but it can’t afford to move

A new report says there’s a lack of spaces for faith-based communities in the north-east inner-city, and urges the council to help. In the north inner-city, wedged between Dorset Street and Hardwicke Street, is Hardwicke Lane. Down this laneway, there’s an Islamic community centre that doubles as a small masjid, which is Arabic for mosque. There’s no sign on the building’s heavy green door. But a small plaque that reads, “Sultan Mecid Education Centre” is affixed to the wall above it. Tunaha...
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