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...
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...
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