Looking forward to attending Laetare Vigil with religious sisters and nuns from many congregations in Ireland and looking forward to meeting the 40 women who come! #vocations #prayer #religiouslife #laetare #religioussisters
Faith-based communities helping new arrivals to integrate, report shows
SORCHA POLLAK
Irish Times, 5 November 2025
Policymakers are failing to collaborate with Dublin’s faith-based communities, who are uniquely placed to pick up on tensions, challenge misinformation and build trust around migrant integration, a new report has found.
The research, carried out earlier this year through interviews with members of 49 faith-based communities in Dublin’s northeast inner city, found these groups play a unique role as “mediators of integration”, addressing challenges such as language barriers and racism “that are often unmet” by the Government and Dublin City Council.
The city council has “preached about welcoming diversity but overlooked one of the major sources of diversity in our city”, notes the study, led by the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. Issues of faith and religion are notably absent from council and national policymaking decisions relating to migrant integration, it adds.
These groups are often the first port of call for newcomers to the city and offer “intrinsic trust” to migrant communities. They “shorten the distance between being an outsider and becoming a neighbour”. Strategising about the future without engaging with them “is to ignore one of the city’s most effective instruments for social cohesion”.
Those interviewed included members of the Roman Catholic, mainstream protestant, Pentecostal, Muslim, Orthodox, Salvationist and independent evangelical faiths.
PART 2 in comments
Harris is spreading disinformation on immigration - Fintan O’Toole
Irish Times, 4 Nov 2025
There is a question that hovers over Irish politics: what will the parties of power do when they start to panic about losing it? Last week, after their joint debacle in the presidential election, we got the grim answer: turn on immigrants.
One of the reasons the far right has been less potent in Ireland is that most mainstream politicians have been responsible in their utterances on immigration. The Government parties have not followed their centrist counterparts in other countries by trying to compete on the terms set by ethnonationalist reactionaries. Until now.
Last week, the Tánaiste Simon Harris said: “Our migration numbers are too high, and I think that is really an issue that needs to be considered in a very serious way by Government. One of the reasons I think they are so high is that there are too many people who come to this country and are told they do not have a right to be here, and it is taking too long for them to leave the country.”
On any ordinary understanding of language, Harris was saying that failed asylum seekers who have not yet been deported make up a very significant proportion of what he considers to be excessive inward migration. And by any ordinary understanding of honest public discourse, this is dangerous nonsense.
It is so obviously absurd that I assumed at first that Harris had, as the Americans say, misspoken – he surely just mangled his words. But the following day, his most senior colleague Pascal Donohoe agreed with what Harris had said. And Fine Gael TD Barry Ward said his leader’s comments had been “measured and absolutely factually correct. He has identified the fact that we do have massive pressure on our migration system, there’s no disputing that.”
Ward, like Harris, referred to “migration” rather than “asylum”. Both men could have said – with rational justification – that there is great pressure on the asylum system. They didn’t – they said that the problem is with migration. And they did this in a “measured” (calculated and deliberate) way.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS …
November 2 - All Souls’ Day
- remembering all those who have gone before us in the Communion of Saints.
“... so also, in Christ, all will be brought to life ... He will destroy death forever”
#AllSoulsDay #loveiseternal
