Last week, I attended the launch of the Women’s Coalition on Immigration in a packed hotel room in central Dublin. Since then, the media coverage of the event, including analysis or commentary in the national press, has been noticeably lacking.
This is despite the fact the coalition consisted of a number of high-profile women, two of whom are barristers, one a journalist who has worked in the national press, and three out of the five women present having run in the national, local, and European elections. The coalition was founded and headed by Laoise de Brún BL, a barrister and women’s rights campaigner.
During the press conference, fears were expressed that any national conversation about the connection between crimes like sexual assault and migration have been stifled because people fear being perceived as racist.
That point appears to have already been proven to be true, judging by the lack of journalists willing to report on the Coalition and the lengthy thematic report it launched just days ago.
The truth about migrant crime, it seems, is indeed difficult to accept.
The same has been the case in Britain, our closest neighbour, where Ministry of Justice data revealed that a quarter of rape and sexual assault convictions last year were carried out by foreign nationals, despite them accounting for little over a tenth of the population. It has been widely reported that government data shows that certain nationalities are far more likely to commit these crimes.
In the absence of that coverage, I wanted to write some more about the launch and share some important insights from the day.
Some key insights came from Tanja Alt, a member of the coalition who hails from Sweden. She came to Ireland in 2000 and, inspired by her experience of migration into Sweden, formed Saggart Guardians, a community engagement group campaigning to save the County Dublin village from what it calls poor government planning.
The group has been a key driver behind packed meetings held to oppose the continued use of Citywest as an IPAS centre. In October, the residents community group said that their local community had been devastated by the news of the alleged sexual assault against a 10-year-old girl. In the months prior to that attack which shocked the country, the group had warned that there were serious safety issues with so many young men seeking asylum congregating in public areas.
LESSONS FROM SWEDEN
Alt told last week’s launch that she moved to Ireland 25 years ago, having already witnessed the impact of two decades of immigration on her native Sweden.
Around 2.1 million of Sweden’s population of 10 million were born abroad (20%) with the most common non-EU countries of origin for foreign-born residents including Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, and Afghanistan.
Despite Sweden’s long-standing trend of immigration, and its reputation as one of the most open countries in the world, in recent years it has attempted to enact stricter asylum laws and other initiatives to reduce irregular migration.
Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Maria Malmer Stenergard, last summer, blamed large-scale immigration and poor integration for a range of social issues, including Sweden’s surge in violent crime. The Scandinavian country, which once boasted a peaceful image on the world stage, has struggled with a drugs gang problem which has prompted attempts to cut asylum seeker numbers.
Since a conservative-led coalition took power in 2022, the number of asylum seekers is at its lowest since 1997, and the country now has more emigrants than immigrants for the first time in five decades.
This year, the Swedish government moved to adopt a tougher stance on migration by introducing new rules which require migrants to prove they have lived an “honest life” to gain citizenship.
A study published by researchers at Lund University in January of this year found nearly two thirds of convicted rapists in Sweden were migrants or second generation immigrants. According to the research, 63 per cent of convictions for rape or attempted rape were given to people born abroad, or whose parents were born abroad.
The study looked at 4,000 convictions between 2000 and 2024. It also suggested that the longer a foreigner lived in Sweden, the less likely they were to commit rape.
Speaking in Dublin last week, Alt shone a light on the Swedish experience.
“I had seen it first hand. I grew up with a lot of second-generation immigrants,” she said.
“Many of them would have been from countries like Poland and Finland, and they would all integrate. You would barely know that they weren’t Swedish.
“However, you had another group who were mainly Muslim, and you would notice that the second-generation of immigrants – from mainly Muslim backgrounds – did not integrate. They actually ended up becoming more extreme than their parents, because they didn’t see the places where their parents came from.
“They came to Sweden and they felt they were different from others because their parents didn’t really integrate. They had their own traditions and so on, so they felt as though they were kind of outside of Swedish society. This caused a lot of second generation immigrants to have a chip on their shoulders. They weren’t really allowed to integrate because of their background,” Alt told the launch.
The campaigner referenced the problem of increasing gang violence in Sweden, an issue which has become so prominent that it was discussed at the European Parliament in February. Alt talked about how, in January 2025 alone, there were approximately 30 gang-related explosions reported in Sweden, with most concentrated in the capital, Stockholm, and often in residential areas.
The European Parliament debate happened just weeks after the high-profile murder of Iraqi anti-Islam activist Salwan Momika in the city of Södertälje. Mr Momika, who gained international attention by burning copies of the Quran in public places in Sweden in 2023, was killed on 29 January by assailants while doing a livestream on the social media app TikTok.
“The perpetrators are not Swedish. Many are from Afghan gangs and Syrian gangs, all fighting for the same turf. The Swedish government has tried hard to integrate groups from various countries but unfortunately it hasn’t worked. And this isn’t me being racist; it’s me telling you facts. This is what is happening and what is going on.”
Alt, speaking about forming Saggart Guardians, described the experience of witnessing the Government’s IPAS strategy as one of deja-vu.
“I thought to myself, I cannot let this happen again as it did to Sweden. My daughter was also a reason for me, as when all of this began in our community, she was only 17. She was devastated seeing what was happening to our community. I wondered why nobody was saying anything or doing anything.
“The people of Saggart are working people with families having to go to work and take care of our kids. No-one has that much time. People were generally fine with temporarily helping people to a certain extent. But then there was a realisation that we are a small village with barely enough resources for our own community, without thousands of additional people coming in.
“We found out in time that 90% of people in Saggart were actually against a permanent IPAS centre, and so we started working against it and saying that enough is enough. A centre that is more than the population of Saggart was not right, and people realised that.”
The coalition’s report, which you can read in full here, draws on official statistics from multiple EU member states including Austria, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Italy and France. It outlines evidence that foreign- born individuals are over-represented in sexual offence data, often by a factor of three to four, with even higher rates in specific subcategories such as gang rape.
Laoise de Brún, highlighted that herself, Una McGurk and Elaine Mullally all ran for public office as independent candidates.
“I think that’s very important,” she said. “All of the women here are fearless advocates.” The lawyer and campaigner, alongside Barbara McCarthy, authored the report, having delved into data from six European nations.
“The findings are stark. What we found was that across the board, non-national men are overrepresented in sexual crime statistics by a factor of three to four. They are three to four times more likely to be involved in rape and sexual assault cases.
“But when you drill down further, it’s even more stark. In some regions, some men are ten times more likely to be represented in those statistics.
“Our immediate ask is to make sure that all criminal statistics, in particular when they pertain to sexual offending, are released and made available when it comes to country of origin and ethnicity.
“I think it is very important that we are unafraid to look at this through a safeguarding lens and through a women’s rights lens. That is our core demand. Women and children cannot be collateral damage due to current policies.”
PULSE SYSTEM
Una McGurk SC, a Barrister and Senior Counsel who has specialised in refugee and mental health law during the course of a lengthy career, also shared key insights.
She highlighted how nationality and ethnicity are not recorded as a mandatory field on An Garda Siochana’s PULSE system, which is why the CSO do not currently publish data on migration and crime.
It is therefore essential, she said, that the public lobby the Minister for Justice, along with the Garda Commissioner and the Central Statistics Office for a mandatory field on PULSE to include nationality and ethnicity.
“This is authorised under law by the Data Protection Act 2018. The law has been in place now for the last seven years and has not been acted on, to the detriment of the Irish people and the Irish criminal justice system.
“The system has been hiding the nationality of suspected offenders which is essential data. We cannot protect Irish people unless there is full transparency in our criminal justice system,” said the barrister.
Barbara McCarthy, a journalist who, over the course of her career, has written for papers including The Irish Times and The Irish Independent, made important points regarding Germany.
“Back in 2015 in Cologne in Germany, there were 800 to 1000 assaults, robberies and rapes. This was also happening in other cities in Germany but it was almost swept under the carpet because there was so much goodwill.”
“I am half-German, so I’ve seen how things have changed,” the journalist added, claiming that “women are withdrawing from public spaces.”
Elaine Mullally, who ran as a general election candidate in Laois, said she believed the group of women needed to “join forces” in order to express concerns about the safety and security of women and children.
“In recent years, I’ve witnessed fear within communities, including in my own community.”
Mullally said that the immigration numbers were a key conversation on the doors in the general election of last year. Asked whether she feels women feel less safe, Mullally agrees that this appears to be the case.
“I met many women who told me that they didn’t feel they could attend community events because they were afraid to leave their homes at night. As a mother of two daughters, I worry deeply about the future. My concerns range from the struggles we are facing as a nation in housing and healthcare, to cultural tensions emerging as our population changes.”
These are all concerns, backed by data, worth hearing. So why were the media so disinterested in women’s concerns? The silence is telling.