Dublin InQuirer •

Against a backdrop of policy shifts, Ukrainian refugee children embrace their Irish life

Ireland is the place they started school, joined sports clubs – yet their parents worry about how changes to citizenship eligibility may haunt their future. Inside their dimly lit living room, Olena Tinhaiev-Kovtun stood in silence in response to small talk. “She doesn’t speak English,” said her 10-year-old daughter Patricia, stepping in front of her mum. The little girl wore a fuzzy white sweater over her pyjama bottoms. Olena smiled and nodded. Both Patricia and her brother Misha, a sporty...
Dublin InQuirer •

Some children in state care struggle to get Tusla sign off for their education courses of choice

The underlying problem, it seems, is a lack of residential places near to their proposed classes. When the boy got here, he had already graduated from high school in his country of birth, he said. He sent photos of certificates on WhatsApp. They show he’s finished secondary education. About a month ago, the young person, who is 17 and can’t be named because he is under Tusla’s care, was accepted to attend a Level 5 course of his choice, he said. “I genuinely want to continue my education.” T...
Dublin InQuirer •

Facing delays renewing his residence permit, a hospital doctor is stuck unable to work

"His inability to work will have a direct impact on the provision of the medical services and our ability to maintain adequate staffing and patient care,” reads a letter from the Rotunda to the Department of Justice. Dr Alaa Boukalfouni spends his days at home waiting and wondering how much longer he has to wait, he said recently. And it’s killing him, he said. He’s not used to staying out of work, said Boukalfouni, sitting at Mooz café in Stoneybatter, recently. Boukalfouni, a maternity doct...
Dublin InQuirer •

At Dublin summit, two translators tell how AI re-shaped their craft

These days, a growing cohort of clients see the translator's job as just cleaning up after the machine, they said. On Saturday morning, Fionnuala Ní Bhrógáin stood at a white podium that bore the logo of the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU). She spoke in a spacious conference room at the offices of CWU on North Circular Road, filled with rows of red folding chairs holding bags of union swag. Two orange sofas sat on the stage behind a round white table. Ní Bhrógáin, head of organising and ca...
Dublin InQuirer •

To counter AI, an illustrator in Balbriggan offers to draw posters for barter

Lauren Fernandes noticed menus and flyers all over with the same sterile look, and thought: what if she could help out small businesses which can't afford creative work, usually? Lauren Fernandes snuck into her backyard, having convinced her dogs, Oscar and Pepper, not to trot along. After introducing a senior long-haired cat, who thrust her head forward for pets, she made her way to a small cabin. Fernandes, who’d pulled back her blue hair into ponytails, wore jeans and a crocheted cardigan...
Dublin InQuirer •

Questions loom over Department of Justice’s account of long-held policy on citizenship rights of temporary asylum stamps

What actually differs between those fleeing the wars on the edge of Europe in the 1990s, and today? To officially stop Ukrainian refugees from using the time they have amassed here on temporary stamps to apply for Irish citizenship, the law must change. That’s because there isn’t anything in the Citizenship Act that keeps carves out an exception for temporary immigration stamp holders. So, the government is seeking to overhaul the legislation to, among other things, make it the letter of the...
Dublin InQuirer •

A new network seeks to encourage Black and immigrant workers to join trade unions

One of the most pressing issues continues to be the impact of Ireland's work-permit regime, which make it risky for employees to speak out if exploited. In June, Jessie Ola-Morris heard about a meeting organised by a labour rights group for Black workers. It was going to be held at the Teachers’ Club on Parnell Square.  She decided to go. “I just thought, I’m African, so if there is an organisation that upholds the rights of African migrant community, why not?” she says. Ola-Morris is a stud...
Dublin InQuirer •

The government wants to add “integration” conditions to the citizenship process. Will it up its own game, too?

People on low incomes, with unstable housing, are bound to be most affected by more stringent policies for citizenship, says Lucky Khambule of the Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland (MASI). Alexander Dashevsky puts a wrinkled Zara paper bag and a bright-coloured backpack down outside the CHQ building in the city’s Docklands. Then he flashes a broad smile. He arrived in Ireland in the summer of 2022, and was granted status under domestic law a year later. But in the last three years, Dashevsky...
Dublin InQuirer •

Brushing Up: The geometric petlife stuck up around the city

In these times, it's something to give people a “nice little pep” as they set out to overcome a new day, said Magnus Mudrack. Stuck on a utility box on Constitution Hill is a poster with simple lines in orange and blue. They trace the face of a giddy dog. Here is that pooch again pasted on a post box on Nassau Street. There's another on College Street – the dog's ears are triangles, its face two rhombuses – on the boarded-up window of the old Irish Yeast Co. A cat drawn, made of similar geom...
Dublin InQuirer •

A collective of immigrants from Jordan delve into shared history in their new home

Exploring common threads, sharing meals and just being kind, are some of the ways that they are looking to take on anti-immigrant narratives about who they are, they say. The five men met in a WhatsApp group, said four of them on Sunday, sitting at the café of Fitzwilliam Hotel on Stephen’s Green. They’re Shogaa Alkalalbeh, Mohammad Alfanatseh, Ghaleb Ghreiz and Ahmad Daggamseh. The fifth guy lives in Cork, so he couldn’t make it, they said. Alfanatseh and Daggamseh are younger, shyer guys w...
Dublin InQuirer •

They're not undocumented. But they can't prove it right now.

There are delays with asylum-card renewals, which "are currently taking longer than normal to process”, said a spokesperson with the Department of Justice. They did not say how big the backlog was. Ayyoub Ismaeel was in the passenger seat of a car when cops sidled up to it recently, he said. “They just stood beside the car and said, ‘Give me an ID’,” said Ismaeel. But not just any ID. They wanted proof that he was not undocumented, he said. Ismaeel, who has appealed an initial rejection on hi...
Dublin InQuirer •

Frustrated with Dublin's glitchy app for public transport, a guy opts to build his own

A spokesperson for the National Transport Authority said that they are considering ways to improve their own tool. Oluwadamilola Adebayo would often notice when bus passengers opened the TFI Live app on their phones, he said, recently. His own experience of the app hadn't been great, he said. “It’s just so slow, so buggy.” And, travelling around Europe and using other countries’ public transport networks last year, Adebayo – an engineering graduate – began to tinker with the idea of putting t...
Dublin InQuirer •

A youth-led uprising in India stirs hopes of greater solidarity among Indian Dubliners

Late last month, a small group gathered on O'Connell Street to support the "cockroaches" movement that had taken to the streets in their country of birth. On O’Connell Street on 26 July, a tiny crowd clustered around a small memorial, two posters flanked by white candles. Priyanka Borpujari leant against the cream stone of the General Post Office, and read from her phone, leading the chants. "Chhattisgarh mein bhi," she said, her intonation rising. In Chhattisgarh, too. "Azaadi," came the re...
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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