"As you can imagine, you've got 20 parking spaces, and we come along and say we're going to take out two of them or something like that to give spaces for people on bikes, it doesn't go down particularly well."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“If they need to redact security information, then by all means, redact it, but not releasing any documents at all doesn’t instil confidence in the system here.”
While the pace of the asylum process has picked up for many applicants, the services helping them to make their cases have lacked the resourcing to keep up.
