DCU Conflict Institute

From Refuge to Rejection: Ireland’s Failure to Protect International Protection Applicants

This personal opinion is written by Dr Fiona Murphy, DCU SALIS 

It was a freezing cold December night, the kind that turns the city sharp and unforgiving. I was walking to my bus after a joyful Christmas party, my keffiyeh snug around my neck—it’s wearing a small, habitual act of solidarity. On Talbot Street, a man approached me. His steps were uneven, his eyes restless, searching for something more than the loose coins people scatter without thought. He saw the keffiyeh and stopped, asking if I was someone who helped Palestinians, if I could spare change. “I’ve nowhere to sleep,” he said plainly, without embellishment.

“Where are you from?” I asked, the question tumbling out as though geography might somehow explain his need. “Ramallah,” he said, steady, and then, unbidden, he rolled up his trouser leg. Scars crisscrossed the skin, pale and jagged, speaking of things he didn’t. I reached for my wallet, pressed money into his hand, but before I could ask anything more—before I could even begin to touch the weight of his words—he was gone, swallowed by the cold night.

In the minutes after, and in the days since, I’ve been haunted by that encounter. The cognitive dissonance it revealed was sharp, unforgiving. Solidarity with Palestine? Yes, I’ve stood on marches, written letters, and worn the keffiyeh with pride. But what does that solidarity mean when a Palestinian man seeking asylum in Ireland is left to the streets? When the country I live in and pay taxes to cannot—or will not—find a place for him to sleep?

The question expands as it touches others. Asylum seekers and refugees pushed into tents outside the Dáil (Irish parliament). Families shivering in subzero temperatures, activists doing the work of a state that has washed its hands of responsibility. The images flash in my mind like a macabre slideshow: people wrapped in sleeping bags donated by strangers, their faces hollowed by hunger and indignity, their very existence a question mark in the shadow of this so-called “Ireland of Welcomes”.

Recent rulings from the High Court—April and December 2023, and again in August 2024—pierce the illusion of legal neutrality, exposing Ireland’s calculated breach of its promises and obligations under European law to those seeking asylum. These judgments make legible the state’s deliberate failure to provide even the bare minimum reception conditions for those seeking asylum, a dereliction that echoes through the fragile intersections of sovereignty and human precarity. “An inability to access basic needs,” the August 2024 ruling declared, “leaves people in a deeply vulnerable and frightening position that undermines their human dignity.” These words, stark and unyielding, illuminate the quiet devastation wrought by the state’s neglect.

This current government thrives on contradiction, a choreography of gestures that cancel each other out. It funds charities to distribute tents, only to send crews to dismantle them under the cover of night, scattering personal belongings like debris. It gestures towards vulnerability assessments, then discards them, leaving international protection applicants—many scarred by violence, by persecution—sleeping rough in public parks, on city streets (Irish Refugee Council Volunteer Report, November 2024).

The hypocrisy is galling. The state proclaims solidarity while turning away from its most basic obligations. We march for Palestine, for Syria, for countless distant tragedies, raising our voices against the forces that drive people from their homes. And yet, when those very people arrive here—carrying their stories, their wounds, their hope—they find not refuge but rejection. They meet a system engineered to wear them down, stripping them of what little remains. They are left to cycle through the cold calculus of survival, choosing between food, warmth, and the dignity promised by asylum. And we are left with questions that pierce through our own avoidance and complicity: What solidarity is this, if it serves only to retraumatise? What does it mean to decry injustice abroad while perpetuating it at home? How long will we let ourselves believe that this is someone else’s responsibility, someone else’s shame?

In the absence of state action, volunteers have stepped in. Many of them are women, they bring food, clothing, and the kind of care that affirms humanity in its smallest gestures. Yet their efforts are met with hostility, targeted by currents of hatred that ripple across our society. Even these acts of care—essential, fragile—exist as resistance in a landscape of systemic neglect(Irish Refugee Council Volunteer Report, November 2024).

But what the volunteers remind us of is simple: solidarity is not a keffiyeh, a slogan, or a march. It is a practice—a commitment to meet the moment, to shoulder the hard truths of who we are and who we fail. It demands reckoning, not only with the failures of the state but with our own complicity in them.

The man on Talbot Street stays with me, his scars a map of pain that words cannot trace. His swift retreat speaks not only to his own story but to the voids we create, the lives erased by policy and the silence we wrap around our failures. What would it take to truly see him, and others like him? To move past hollow gestures and build something tangible, something that could hold the weight of what we claim to believe?

The High Court rulings make the path clear: provide shelter, restore dignity, meet the most basic of human needs. And yet, the tents remain, scattered like unanswered questions, their presence a quiet indictment of our neglect. Solidarity, if it is to have any meaning, cannot stop where discomfort begins. It must push harder, stretch wider, demand everything.

These are not theoretical concerns. They press against the edges of now—the man on Talbot Street, the tents outside the Dáil, the rulings we have ignored. They insist that we reckon with what we permit, that we stop pretending solidarity is effortless. The moment for looking away has long since passed.