If We Want Those Visas Approved, It Is Time To Move Past Respectability Politics

The student movement in Ireland has been a driving force in Palestine solidarity organising across the state, renewing itself as an important actor in 2024. Over the early summer months students at TCD, UCD, and UCC won significant concessions from their colleges during the global encampment wave. In fact, these were some of the most successful encampments in the world (although this can mostly be chalked up to Ireland’s very different political context to other western and Anglophone countries). Outside of the questions of divestment and cutting of academic ties with Israeli institutions, the key win of these encampments was securing a guarantee from Irish universities to welcome Palestinian students who were victims of scholasticide by Israel, and in UCD the establishment of 32 years of new funding for Palestinians in addition to the existing Sanctuary Scholarship programme administered by the Irish state. These spaces were established and ready to be taken up by the following autumn. By the start the of 2025-26 academic year, more than 86 Palestinian students began their studies across Ireland, funded by a myriad of sources, following a similar period of struggle with the Department of Foreign Affairs by officials in the Students’ Unions on the issue of coordinating evacuation flights. There was no apparent issue of systemic visa denial.

These concessions and this level of cooperation from the universities and the state was only possible because students threatened their ability to do business as usual. In TCD it was the blocking of the Book of Kells and freezing of all tourist revenue when campus was locked down during the (albeit brief) encampment. In UCD, where there was no analogous target to Trinity’s tourist market, the financial threat of the encampment compounded over those five weeks by on the lakeshore. What was at first an eyesore to the patrons of the University Club and corporate events in O’Reilly Hall slowly became a more expensive nuisance: disrupting lunch goers in the Club’s dining room, cancelling the Intel-sponsored UCD Festival, drying up the corporate event bookings, and eventually blocking off the views for the graduate-entry medicine commencement— upsetting many of the students who had just finished coughing up over €100k for their degrees. By early June this all became too much, and the jet setter-in-chief of Belfield, Orla Feely, ordered her negotiators to stand down to the protestors demands.

It was only through wielding the power of collective action to halt revenue generation that gains were made, and the new context for the pro-Palestine campus struggle were set. They were reminded of their students’ power, and they were afraid of it being unleashed again. But now, two years later, the memory has dissipated and it appears the students have lost their bite.

Ahead of this academic year, so began the annual effort of students in the various BDS groups and Students’ Unions around Ireland assisting Palestinians who have secured offers from their colleges with the visa and evacuation process. Things began to go noticeably wrong by mid-summer, and by August it was clear that the Department of Justice had changed their procedures, and were applying the law antagonistically. This is not surprising from Minister Jim O’Callaghan— who has spent his tenure at the department pushing Ireland’s immigration enforcement to new heights of cruelty (see here the June 2025 incident where five children were removed from their accommodation at the Red Cow Hotel in the middle of the night, asleep under the assumption they would be attending school as normal in the morning, and deported to Nigeria). As the visa denials rolled in, a pattern emerged. As UCDSU President Enzo Crothers put it, these Palestinian students future was being decided “on the basis of who is signing the scholarship cheques.”

Almost exclusively, those who were coming to Ireland on official Government funding progammes were the only ones being approved. Even students with university-sponsored funding or full ability to privately pay were being denied for petty reasons: it is difficult to provide transcripts from a school that has been bombed off the map, or statements from a bank flattened under airstrikes.

What followed from the student movement was a protest called outside the Department of Justice on the 19th of August. A gathering of the relevant Students’ Unions sabbatical officers, the small but dedicated groups of student volunteers, and many, many elected officials and party staff of the soft left. Speakers from the Soc Dems, the Green Party, and Labour seemed to outnumber student contributions— and were all from the perspective of the concerned parent, placing themselves in the position of guidance and care over both those organising the protest in Dublin and the young Palestinian adults they are meant to be showing solidarity with in the first place. It was a greatest hits run through of Irish respectability politics— with Green Party Spokesperson on Further and Higher Education Eva Dowling even touching on the classic we-go-abroad-and-get-visas-in-Australia-so-we-should-empathise bit. Wherefore art thou student organisers? Is this what the movement has to offer now? Petitions and official negotiation routes? Support from elected officials is helpful in getting things done, but it does nothing in comparison to the wrath of a young mob disturbed.

I am not arguing for individual adventurist action— this does little more than generate instagram likes, and is best left to others outside the official movement who can do this to maintain media attention (as with the Jews for Palestine and Naoise Dolan operation, chaining themselves to the Department of Justice last week). What the student movement needs is something big, something expensive and disruptive, and something soon. The last evacuation flight before term registration deadlines is October 3rd. The flow of commerce can be stopped again. Your University can be forced to intervene harder than they are now. Remind them who holds the power.