Gardaí likely knew Kurdish woman, whose body was returned to Turkey, wished to be buried in Ireland

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 highest point of the Cliffs of Moher.

The clubcard led him to Ateşoğlu’s asylum shelter in Co. Galway, where a letter in Turkish sat in her room. It was her “will”, it said.

Until now, when immigration solicitor Wendy Lyon got hold of records from the coroner’s inquest into Ateşoğlu’s death, it wasn’t clear whether the guards had read Ateşoğlu’s note – in which she’d pleaded for a burial in Ireland

At the time, Ayanna Williams, her friend at the asylum shelter, said that shortly after Ateşoğlu’s death, the officers who visited the centre said they had the note but couldn’t read it.

Garda O’Neill’s deposition, cited in the inquest records, says that it was translated after all. “Following translation, it was established that the letter expressed an intention to take her own life,” it said.

It doesn’t say anything else about the note. But after making sense of it, the guards had reached out to Turkish officials – from whom she’d sought shelter here as a Kurdish woman – at the country's embassy in Dublin, it said.

Said Ateşoğlu’s note: “Do not give my corpse to the oppressors”. It said she wanted her body to lay claim to “a handful of soil” here. 

Against that final wish, she was returned to Turkey, buried there in January 2025.

Her family had been contacted. DNA tests on them had been carried out to verify the body was Ateşoğlu’s, said Garda O’Neill’s deposition. 

Ateşoğlu’s relationship with her family was fraught, said several of her friends in Ireland and Turkey last year. “I don’t have a family,” her letter said.

A spokesperson for An Garda Síochána referred queries to the Department of Justice, saying it oversees the Coroners Service, which is responsible for the custody of remains.

The department has been asked about the case twice, in February and September of 2025, but hasn’t addressed questions about details of the case. 

Of course, burial instructions aren’t legally binding in Ireland – but the person responsible for burying the dead can choose to honour their wishes, wrote Ruhi Anand of University of Limerick’s School of Law for RTÉ in 2020.

If someone’s family decided to ignore their wishes that doesn’t mean nothing can be done, Anand wrote. “The executor [of their will] may seek judicial support to prevent it from happening,” she wrote.

So nominating an executor can safeguard the deceased’s right to choose, her article said.

Ateşoğlu, who was still waiting for a decision on her asylum case here, probably didn’t know all that. Not only she did she not have an advocate, her suicide note couldn’t have been considered a valid will – even if she called it one. 

Gabriella Soto, contemporary archaeologist at Arizona State University in the United States – who researches death in migration – said unwitnessed handwritten notes, known as holographic wills, usually don’t carry any legal weight.

One last thing before I go

Thomas Lacroix, a researcher at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences – whose work has also probed experiences of death in migration – said Ateşoğlu’s story is “poignant” but doesn’t surprise him.

Western government officials aren’t going to be the ones advocating on behalf of dead immigrants, he said by phone, last week.

Lucky Khambule of the Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland (MASI), who, alongside community activist Ken McCue, had met with Garda officials about Ateşoğlu’s case last year, said they weren’t told that her note was translated. 

Khambule said he’d thought they didn’t know her burial preference because they couldn’t read her letter. “Oh dear, really?” he said in a text message last week.

Soto, the contemporary archaeologist, said biological relatives also often take precedence. 

“These notions of family built into our legal systems are just so rigid. Even if this wasn’t a family a person associated with or, you know, family they would trust to make last decisions for them,” she said.

The aftermath of Ateşoğlu’s death, she said, sheds light on how those policies can let people down after their death. 

It’s also a unique case study because state officials are rarely tasked with granting a final wish by an immigrant for others to see how they’d react, she said.

My body, myself

A book co-authored by Lacroix, the researcher in Paris, says their deaths can expose just how much immigrants are seen as not belonging in a country of choice.

Their “ways of being out-of-place become most visible and contentious, in relation to burial rules and sites”, it said. 

It mentions the erosion of the right to choose and questions why it isn’t considered a big deal in social and political discourse. 

“Where migrants should be disposed of, and how mainstream ways of disposal and burial sites should be adapted (if at all), are questions of remarkable social and political relevance,” said the book.

Said Lyon, the solicitor: “Subject to certain conditions, there’s no reason in principle they couldn’t set up a legally binding arrangement for anyone who dies here.”

A study from half a century ago still holds true, said the book co-authored by Lacroix, that some immigrants’ humanity is rendered invisible by their status as workers to the point that their mortality feels unimaginable.

If envisioned, it is away from the soil they died toiling on.

“[T]hey do not age: they do not get tired: they do not die. They have a single function – to work. All other functions of their lives are the responsibility of the country they come from,” it said.

They’re expected to be healthy, active, and young, it said. That’s why some people feel the need to return “home” when old, sick or dying, said the book.

Both Soto and Lacroix said it’s unrealistic to expect state actors to try to commemorate people, after their death, who tried to seek asylum.

They point to how it’s usually not government bodies keeping a tally of the people who die, swallowed by the Mediterranean, or trekking through perilous routes into the United States. 

And she’d argue that those deaths should be seen as “structural homicide”, Soto said, because it’s government bodies making entry visas inaccessible to most people – “the myth of the right way really makes me angry”.

Still, “most of the counting is by academic groups and non-governmental organisations,” she said.

In France, said Lacroix last week, bodies of undocumented workers can lie in morgues for years until someone contacts human rights organisations.

“Death in migration unveils diversity (and inequality) in death,” said the book he co-authored.

In Ireland, failure to capture contact details and addresses of emergency contacts for people seeking asylum who are here alone also means their bodies can lie in limbo, too.

A sample asylum form shows that it inquires about the names of spouses, partners or civil partners, dependents and up to three relatives who live in Ireland, seeking information about the latter’s immigration and citizenship statuses though. 

It’s vital for the press to probe immigrants’ encounters with death and report on their aftermath, said Lacroix, the researcher in Paris. “I think otherwise, we don’t care.”

In the asylum system she died while waiting in, Ateşoğlu’s death is forgotten already.

In response to a GDPR request on behalf of someone close to Ateşoğlu and a note clarifying she’d died on 25 June 2025 from Abbey Law, the firm of Lyon, the solicitor, the International Protection Office (IPO) sent a response eight months later – on 4 March.

It asked if it’s true that she’s no longer alive, seeking proof.