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 Pact. It went into force earlier this month.
The pact allows non-lawyers to offer what it calls “legal counselling” early on as people fill out forms and get set up in the system.
Until a few years ago, people who came to Ireland and wanted to apply for asylum could pick up forms and seek a lawyer’s help in completing them, because getting small stuff wrong can jeopardise their cases.
But as Ireland – and now the EU, through the pact – have sought to speed up the processing of asylum claims, and deportation of people whose claims have failed, applicants' access to lawyers also diminished.
The Legal Aid Board had struggled to offer timely legal support to everyone under the previous asylum law in recent years as the Department of Justice sped up case processing for more people.
The Department of Justice and the Legal Aid Board had for the past several months been chugging away on a plan to cope with the demands of new procedures under the pact.
Even as the state has become harsher with people seeking asylum, though, this has not calmed anti-immigrant groups, who are expressing outrage about the new 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.
“They need to double down. Their political platform relies on this,” said Henrique Tavares Furtado, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
Legal counselling, said a spokesperson for the Department of Justice, is any “guidance, explanation, information or assistance” offered to applicants.
The person offering it can be a Legal Aid Board staffer or a contractor for the board, “who is considered to be qualified by reason of knowledge, experience, qualifications, training, or expertise”, they said.
This practice has been criticised both by lawyers and human rights organisations. Among them, Fiona Hurley of migrants’ rights non-profit NASC, has said that they are “concerned that the proposed concept of legal counselling will fall significantly short of legal advice or representation”.
Legal counselling will be offered on-site at Citywest “reception centre” — formerly known as the transit centre—in Saggart, a location that the government chose as a “screening centre” for those who file sanctuary requests under a novel regime.
Help with other stages of asylum seeking, after the initial application is filed, will be offered as normal by the Legal Aid Board, the spokesperson for the Department of Justice said.
Those arriving at the Citywest “undergo screening” there, but they aren’t detained [there], said the Department of Justice spokesperson. But their movement might be restricted, or they’d need to present to immigration officers or Gardaí, they said.
The new asylum law lays out the grounds under which the state can hold some applicants in detention and “alternatives to detention”.
Those include, among other things, trying to verify someone's nationality or identity, pinning down details of an asylum claim when it's not possible to do that without confining them or when someone has not shown up when asked by officials in the past and is likely to bounce, it says.
But it would keep any detention to a minimum and inform those detained of their right to legal representation, said the spokesperson for the Department of Justice.
After screening at Citywest, some people will be accommodated in restricted “asylum border procedure centres”. Their claims will be reviewed within three months, and if rejected, they should be deported within another three months, the government has said in the past.
That can include those perceived to be a security threat, people from countries whose citizens’ asylum cases have a success rate of lower than 20 percent in Europe and those who’ve “misled authorities” – like by showing up without their documents – former Minister for Justice Fine Gael’s Helen McEntee had said.
Those not rerouted to the border procedure will be accommodated in asylum centres, as in the past. They can expect two different timeframes for an initial reply, said immigration barrister Cathal Malone.
If their cases are being “accelerated”, they can expect an initial ruling on their application within three months; if not, they can get a first reply within six months, he said.
The point of these rules, said the spokesperson for the Department of Justice, is to “ensure that applicants are treated fairly and humanely while also ensuring the effective and efficient operation of our international protection system”.
Lucky Khambule of the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI) said he hasn’t yet heard from new applicants since the new procedures kicked in earlier this month and worries that their voices may not be heard.
Even as these new procedures have come into effect under the EU Migration and Asylum Pact, anti-immigrant groups have rallied against them.
On 7 June, a few days before the pact kicked in, a new petition against it appeared on Change.org.
It’s titled “Stop the EU Migration Pact in Ireland”. As of Saturday, it had collected 1,850 signatures.
It says it was created by Úna Daly, one of several anti-immigrant influencers with a “digital creator” badge stitched onto their profiles on Facebook – meaning their accounts are in “professional mode” and potentially monetisable.
Then, when anti-immigrant groups announced a protest in Dublin on the heels of racist rioting in Belfast on 9 June – spawned by a stabbing attack over which a man from Sudan was charged with attempted murder– an AI-generated poster called for a “referendum on migration pact” as one of their demands.
Also, the political party Aontú has a petition of its own against the pact – with a title similar to Daly’s, and more than 65,000 signatories – and it has submitted a bill to “remove” Ireland from the pact.
The party’s petition says the new law doesn’t address the border with the North. Under the pact, many people can still come, Aontú’s petition said. It blames them for the shortage of affordable housing and school places.
It doesn’t say what the pact does to the asylum process itself, and how it aims to fast-track both case processing and deportation for lots of people, just that it would bind Ireland “to EU migration quotas”.
However, the Minister for Justice, Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan, has said Ireland would pay €9.26 million next year to eschew those quotas imposed to support countries like Italy and Greece, where many people seeking asylum first arrive through the Mediterranean Sea.
Later, in a press release, Aontú also criticised that plan, as a “significant cost” to the country. “The Pact is of significant threat to this country and it’s wrong. It should be opposed even at this late stage,” it said, quoting the party leader Peadar Tóibín.
A spokesperson for Aontú has not yet responded to queries sent on Thursday evening, including one asking what it would do differently.
Patrick Costello, former Green Party TD and its spokesperson on justice, said that, for major opponents, the focus is on protesting the harsher asylum policy by misrepresenting it without offering any real solutions.
That’s frustrating, he said.
“A lot of people are opposed to the pact because it has been spun,” he said.
Furtado, at the University of the West of England, said that, historically, meeting the demands of anti-immigrant hardliners has failed to satisfy them.
They can’t admit that their agenda has become mainstream in the EU, and most countries in the zone have taken steps to please them.
Last week, some members of the European Parliament clapped and chanted “send them back” after voting to formally adopt a new deportation law, which paves the way for shuttling people to countries outside of the EU to which they have no connection.
Fine Gael MEPs Nina Carberry, Regina Doherty and Seán Kelly, and Fianna Fáil MEPs Barry Cowen, Billy Kelleher and Cynthia Ní Mhurchú voted for the measure. Doherty sent out a press release to make sure everyone knew she was going to vote for it.
Shortly before the vote, Maria Walsh, a Fine Gael MEP who voted against, posted a short video explaining why she would oppose it.
This law, she said, among other things, would shuttle people to countries they've never set foot in to hold them in detention for lengthy periods, and there's no promise that their human rights would be respected, she said.
“There is also a possibility that families with young children could be held in these centres too,” said Walsh.
In the United States, the Trump administration is already doing this. Sending some people from the US via Shannon Airport to third countries, with the Department of Foreign Affairs unwilling to release information about the flights, and Gardaí unwilling to inspect conditions on board.
But anti-immigration extremists, “can’t stop and say, no, [their agenda] has become part of the political establishment,” Furtado said.
Doing that means losing either political relevance or revenue made from pushing polarising content online, he said.
Furtado points to newly adopted rules in Sweden, which mandate some public workers – like revenue office workers, among others – to report undocumented people they come across, as a cruel policy brought in to placate anti-immigrant groups, who are unlikely to be too impressed.
“If reporting mandates – or ‘snitch laws’ – are introduced in public services, people will be afraid to use essential services like hospitals, care systems, schools, and public transportation, while putting at risk our members working in those sectors,” said Jan Willem Goudriaan, general secretary of the European Public Services Union, in a news release last week.
"I think it's a slap in the face of inclusivity, of diversity of this city, if we can move to develop nearly 5,000 units and we can not even develop one new site of Traveller accommodation," said one councillor.
Those joining the cat crawl got a map marked with the cats' locations and names across nearly 20 households.
“I do believe in this project, but it is hard to stand over that when we were given unsound advice," said one councillor.
It is not clear if the records are accurate, or whether a new system for tracking maintenance requests will allow tracking of how long it takes the council to fix things.
