Financial Support – New Horizon Athlone

Study support for DP students gets better

Government changes to the rules for third-level support for asylum-seekers mean five times as many applications have succeeded. In 2019 only five students qualified for…

Angela 2020-11-23

Bring some Christmas magic to Direct Provision

Every year, with help from the Athlone Institute of Technology Students’ Union and AIT International Students, we organise a Children’s Christmas Party with gifts and…

Gerry Callaghan 2020-11-12

Laptops available

Many educational and training courses have had to move online due to the Covid-19 lockdown. This creates problems for many people. It’s almost impossible to…

Gerry Callaghan 2020-11-02

You could gain a leadership qualification

Waterford Area Partnership, in collaboration with the Mukisa Programme, is offering a Certificate course in Leadership and Community Development. Here are the details, and note…

Gerry Callaghan 2020-10-04

Asylum Seekers and third-level education

Simon Harris (Minister for Further and Higher Education, as well as Research, Innovation and Science, or RIS) announced earlier this year that people in the…

Gerry Callaghan 2020-08-13

We are a front line refugee support group mainly working on the Lissywollen Direct Provision site in Athlone. Our focus is on providing information and help to the 300 (on average) residents living there.

We also work on the Temple Direct Provision site in Horseleap, Moate.

Everyone in the DP sites in Athlone and Temple is what is described as a ‘Convention’ refugee. People who have arrived in Ireland under a United Nations resettlement program are known as ‘Programme’ refugees.

Convention refugees are people who have made their own way to Ireland and have applied for recognition of refugee status when they arrive.

Various official and unofficial routes and methods are used to travel to Ireland. These change continually, depending on weather conditions and enforcement levels at crossings.

On arrival people are normally housed for a few weeks in Baleskin, near Dublin airport. They are then dispersed to various direct provision centres around the country.

People can get protection if they meet the conditions set out in The United Nations Convention on Protection of Refugees.

See Definition of a Refugee