By Eoghan Harris
How can you fight for equality in Ireland?
Immigrant Council of Ireland, a NGO operating in the 26 counties, asks this question on their donations page. 80% of their funding comes from EU bodies.
EU countries give up their sovereignty for access to EU markets. As a result, EU dictates to Ireland migration policy. EU migration policy is characterized by neoliberal barbarism.
EU legal migration policy is about outsourcing and extracting skilled labour from all over the globe, for the human resources departments of giant US/Zionist Corporations. When it suits the needs of capital, pathways for migration are opened.
When people come from war and persecution and they do not fit into the needs of these economic interests, the EU flexes its fascist muscles.
This apartheid EU migration policy is Rusophobic and racist. It is white supremacist and works for the geopolitical strategies of western imperialism. Refugees are compelled to denounce the enemies of western powers upon application for asylum, even if this is not who they are really running from. This was made clear in Syria as 2 million Christians fled Wahhabi death squads, which were sponsored by the US in Operation Timber Sycamore. Refugees simply had to denounce Bashar Al-Assad to avoid being stuck in concentration camps in Turkey or on Greek Islands. Refugees are compelled to apply as political refugees rather than humanitarian refugees, so western powers can de-legitimize governments that do not do as the imperialists want them to.
The Immigrant Council of Ireland signed a manifesto to give 100,000 Ukrainians citizenship in Ireland. That is why, during the “Abolish Direct Provision” campaign hunger strikes in January 2026, asylum seekers demonstrated outside the EU funded NATO-friendly immigrant Council of Ireland. They were not demanding “handouts” like accommodation or social welfare, just accountability from this organization which is supposed to have their interest at heart.
EU pushes this racist two-tier asylum policy. Ukrainians are prioritized, welcomed and celebrated, with immediate access to integration support and social services while black and brown asylum seekers get bureaucratic push back and are subjected to inhuman treatment. Immigrant Council of Ireland normalise and make invisible this cruelty. Their Eurocentric racist mindset is reflected in this manifesto.
Such European NGOs use progressive liberal-left language but this is a choreographed act. This is clear as the asylum seekers illustrated the fact that CEO Tereasa Bukowska went to the US for activism training.
This is imperial governance dressed up in pseudo-radical clothing. It is reflected directly in the leadership of the Immigrant Council of Ireland. The Chairperson of the Board of Governors, Dr Roja Fazaeli, is a Professor of Law and Islamic Studies at the Irish Centre for Human Rights in University of Galway. She is an academic deeply embedded within EU-funded legal, human rights, and research institutions, including as a recipient of a European Research Council grant. She is also director of an “Online University”, Iran Academia which has endorsed the recent Mossad and Western intelligence-led violent destabilization operation on Iran in which over 3,000 were killed and hundreds of public amenities, places of worship and homes were burned. These deaths are framed as the actions of a totalitarian government cracking down on legitimate dissent, despite the fact that this was an overt rather than covert operation by Israel and the US, and the subsequent shows of support for national unity and sovereignty on the streets succeeding the violence.
Contemporary European human rights discourse operates as a soft-power instrument of the EU and its NATO-aligned order, selectively mobilized to discipline states outside the Western imperial bloc while legitimizing intervention.
The concept of “human rights” is abstracted from imperial context. Violence attributed to states designated as adversaries of the West is foregrounded, while the structural violence of EU sanctions, coups, wars of aggression, border regimes, intelligence operations and migration policy is minimized or ignored completely. The inevitable selective moralism therefore, functions ideologically, helping to justify the geopolitical and economic processes that generate displacement in the first place.
In this case, a leading academic in an Irish university, who is a director of an EU funded NGO is giving direct assistance to the US-Israeili war plans as they plan to launch a war of aggression on Iran.
Feminist credentials, academic respectability and being part of the Iranian diaspora are effective tools to mask her service to the Zionist dominated US war machine.
And when the refugee crisis from this catastrophic war reaches the shores of Europe, who will the EU asylum system compel people to denounce? You can be sure it won’t be Donald Trump or Benjamin Nethanyahu.