Years after promise of a new integration strategy, Dublin City Council still doesn’t have one

For months in 2021, it looked like Dublin City Council (DCC) was busy chewing over plans for a new integration strategy covering the years 2021 to 2025.

Then the momentum died. All those years that the council was meant to lead integration efforts with a concrete roadmap have slipped by without one.

Meanwhile, almost one in five people living in Dublin were born outside of Ireland and the United Kingdom, said the 2022 census results. That share rises even further in the north inner-city. 

In 2023, a council spokesperson said the work to draw up a new integration strategy was held up by the wait for the rollout of a national policy.

Earlier this month, Janet Horner, a Green Party councillor for the north-inner city, followed up with council officials again. 

The council’s chief executive, Richard Shakespeare, replied that the national strategy is slated for publication in June 2026. Once that happens, the council will begin to develop a “local migrant integration strategy”.

It’s taking too long, say some Dublin city councillors and community workers. 

There’s a need for a concrete roadmap to improve efforts for helping people navigate immigrant life and connect with those outside their bubbles to close rifts that have grown since 2021, they say.

“The fact that we don’t have an integration strategy and we haven’t had one for a few years, despite an increasingly obvious need for one in the city, means that [Local Authority Integration Team] is working without a strategic framework,” said Horner by phone, recently. 

Says Labour Party Councillor Darragh Moriarty: “Since the last strategy lapsed in 2020, we are now living in a completely different context, with some peddling racism, anti-immigrant sentiment and hatred in our communities.”

In the meantime 

It’s not that the council’s not doing any integration work at all.

It has a Local Authority Integration Team (LAIT) at the moment. But that team’s not there to help the majority of immigrants to integrate into Dublin society better. 

Their work is focused on offering integration support to one specific cohort, says Shakespeare’s reply to Horner. 

That is, people seeking asylum, according to the government website. It says the goal of LAITs is to aid sanctuary seekers settle into their communities. 

“They do this by connecting people to important services that can help them integrate into the community,” it says.

But people seeking asylum are just one small group of immigrants in Ireland. 

Of the roughly 593,000 people living in Dublin city, around 3,190 of them have beds in asylum shelters right now.

While waiting for the national strategy to roll out, the LAIT “is proactively engaging in international collaboration, consulting with Eurocities to benchmark and learn best practices”, a council spokesperson said.  

The words to say it 

A recent study on integration published by the European Sociological Association notes three markers for measuring integration: level of skill in the language of the new country, degrees of education, and whether someone was an immigrant or their parents were.

In Dublin, barriers remain for immigrants who want to pursue two of these paths towards further integration: learning or improving their English, and pursuing more education.

Some immigrants to Ireland have said they struggle to access English-language classes offered by government-funded education and training boards (ETBs), including the one in the city, because they fill up quickly. 

In response to queries about this, the Dublin City Council spokesperson said some other groups, including the Irish Refugee Council, also offer classes.

Even when classes are available, though, it’s not always easy for people to get to them.

Lucinda Thompson, an English language “teacher trainer” who helps organise free classes in Temple Bar, says she’s noticed a waterfall of complex hurdles.

Thompson offers these classes for free because the tutors she is training need learners to hone their teaching skills, she says.

She has found it surprisingly difficult to reach people and convince them to join free classes, says Thompson.

“I just literally do a lot of legwork, cold calling and putting up flyers in libraries. I’ve got a huge huge list of people who’ve been before, and I email them all again,” she said.

Often, people come to a few classes and then drift off, Thompson says.

One obstacle is poor access to childcare, she says. Programme rules mean she can’t accommodate kids younger than 16 in class, Thompson says.

“This is due to safeguarding concerns,” she says. And it can be tough to turn people away, Thompson says.                                                             

“You know people get understandably upset if they trek in from God-knows-where with a 13-year-old, and I say, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come in,’” she says.

The council spokesperson said some of the groups involved in organising English language classes deliver them in asylum centres.

Lower tech literacy is another hurdle, frustrating learners who are new to the country, says Thompson.

“We do a lot of sort of QR codes for registration and things like that, and it can be too much for people to cope,” she says.

That also means they’re unsure who to turn to access services, and grapple with getting information and doing things that have to be done online, Thompson says.

“There’s a lot of good stuff being done, but it’s all piecemeal and it’s very hard for people to access it,” she said. 

She has also noted, Thompson said, that some people struggle to connect with other immigrant groups in class, which is encouraged to improve their conversation skills with others who don’t speak their first language. 

“At one point, we had a lot of [Somali] women coming in, but they were coming in as a group, and they found it really difficult being asked to talk to people outside of their group,” she said.

Sometimes students drop out because it’s hard to survive on the roughly €38 a week that people seeking asylum get, Thompson says. 

They get any jobs they can get as soon as they get work permits, and stop coming to class, she said.

So close and yet so far 

Abdulai Mansaray is a community link worker for Young People at Risk (YPAR). 

He’s mostly supporting kids who are seeking protection and families, he said.

He’s warm and friendly, wearing a beaded chain around his neck, bracelets on his wrist and athleisure wear.

He says he sees his younger self in the kids he’s working with because he’s jumped over the same hurdles and fought for a shot at integration. 

As a former asylum seeker, Mansaray had struggled to access higher education, he says.

A few years ago, he was forced to turn down an offer to study law at Maynooth University at €14,000 a year in tuition fees because he grappled with affording the basics, he told a gathering of past and present asylum seekers last year. 

People in the asylum process aren’t eligible for the college education subsidy SUSI because they need a few years of living on regular immigration papers to qualify, and universities’ limited sanctuary scholarships disappear fast. 

In the meantime, they have to pay non-EU tuition fees. Undocumented kids can’t access third-level education at any price, even if they were born here. 

Mansaray says that the restricted access to education that’s available to their classmates impacts the mental health of young people he works with, causing them to feel marginal and withdraw. “Sometimes, education is their only chance,” he said. 

The emergency centres these kids are growing up in, he says, are not suitable places to come of age in either. “Most of these emergency centres don’t have any safe spaces for kids to play.”

As for learning English for all kinds of people, Mansaray says, the immigration system and precarious living conditions can be so gruelling to navigate that it’s probably not reasonable to expect people to stick to language classes.

“It is very stressful, I’ve been through it, and I understand,” he said. 

Sometimes, he said, people are just not in the mood to talk to anyone who doesn’t speak their first language. That’s okay, Mansaray says, they should be given time and space. 

Thompson, the teacher trainer in Temple Bar, says she’s conscious of that. She tries not to push people. 

She reassures them that low attendance doesn’t affect their immigration status the way it does for people on student immigration permissions, Thompson said.

“I completely get it, some of them are just not emotionally fit to sit around and chat about what their best holiday ever was,” she said.

With greater understanding 

Mansaray says he has met with the coordinator at the council’s integration team that focuses on asylum seekers a couple of times.

He’s grateful for that, but he likes to see a solid roadmap for integration that accounts for all challenges and sketches out a plan to address them soon.

“This should be a city for all, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, whatever,” he said.

Melting into the community in the north inner-city, he says, has made him more conscious of the hardships that other people face, including working-class Irish people.

“When you engage with people and you truly get to know them, you see that the injustices you’d faced, it’s not only you, it affects so many other people, and have that sort of empathy,” he said. 

That lines up with the findings of the recent study on the impact of integration published by the European Sociological Association.

“Increasing integration heightens awareness of not only the discrimination directly affecting the immigrants’ own group but also the discrimination faced by

other out-groups,” it says.

The council chief executive’s reply to Horner, the north- inner city councillor, mentions 90 meetings between council officials and asylum-centre managers as one achievement of its integration team, despite the absence of a strategy.

“In person clinics since June 2025 offering supports to 114 individuals and addressing over 230 queries relating to education, training, accommodation, justice and rights, employment [....]” it says.

It also lists aiding diverse get-togethers, like Culture Night and Africa Day. 

But Horner says she sees problems in her constituency that go beyond the asylum centres, and a policy framework is needed to address them soon.

“The local authority integration team won’t be able to deliver that because they are focused on asylum seekers,” she said.

She’s also unsure that help with throwing different events is the best use of time for integration teams, Horner said.

All kinds of community groups have sprouted around the city to help people seeking asylum, and without a clear strategy, the council might be replicating their services, she said.

“Is there a better way to enhance what they’re doing as opposed to creating their own versions of services?” Horner said.

Immigrant businesses in the north inner-city are pushed to the margins and can be isolated at the moment, too, she said, and there should be a plan in place to change that. 

The response Horner got from the council about the status of the integration strategy notes that the local migrant integration strategies local authorities are to develop “adopt a broad definition of ‘migrant’, encompassing all non-native individuals, their Irish-born children, and new citizens”.

Horner says she was disappointed by the use of terms like “non-natives” and stretching the definition of “migrant” to include kids who were born here, as mentioned in the chief executive's reply.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate language,” she said.

The Dublin City Council spokesperson said those concerns are valid, and “highlight a critical need for precise and inclusive language in public discourse and policymaking”.

Mansaray, the youth worker, says he wants to see a city in which what he fought hard to achieve doesn’t lie so out of reach for immigrant kids who came after him.

“They’re facing maybe more than double what I faced,” he said. 

Despite a delayed chance at education, Mansaray was named Law Student of the Year at the Leap Irish Law Awards in June.

“The entire TU Dublin community is proud of you,” says a post by the university announcing his win.