The Community Engagement Team of the Department of Justice has cancelled a meeting with representatives of the Stamullen community regarding the proposed placing of persons who have applied for International Protection in a residential house in the Forgehill estate.
As we now know the house is in the ownership of the Department. The meeting, which was to take place this morning in the Civic Building in Bettystown, had been arranged prior to the discovery of that ownership.
In response to the cancellation, Stamullen Community Alert have said that they “have since gone back and requested a new date and time for the meeting. So far, the response we have received has been the copy-and-paste information already sent to us in previous emails.
“We have replied again, asking for a proper date to meet, and we are currently awaiting a response. At this stage, it appears the engagement team is unwilling to engage with us.”
Sinn Féin TD for Meath East, Darren O’Rourke had stated last week that he had been in contact with the Department regarding the concerns of people in Stamullen and that the meeting scheduled for today had been arranged on foot of that.
I asked Deputy O’Rourke if he had “been given any indication as to why the CET decided to cancel and if such a meeting will take shortly, prior to any placement of persons in the house in Forgehill?”
Deputy O’Rourke has stated that the cancellation is “deeply, deeply frustrating. Engagement, with accurate information, is essential. I had specifically sought this meeting for residents and welcomed the fact when it was confirmed.
“When the restricted numbers to attend the meeting were confirmed, I contacted the Department to ask that the meeting be expanded to accommodate more community representatives, local Oireachtas members and councillors and, separately, for a wider public meeting to be held.”
I also asked the Community Engagement Team “What were the reasons for the cancellation and are the plans to organise another meeting shortly?” They promised almost immediately that they would be “in touch with you shortly.” When they did get back in touch it was to tell me that the query had been forwarded to the press office. There was no further communication prior to publication.
In their email to one of those who was to have attended the meeting, the Community Engagement Team state that the cancellation was due to “unforeseen events.” They then go on to “share some information about how people seeking international protection will be accommodated in your area which we hope is helpful.”
Apparently, this information was supplied to “local elected representatives” on Tuesday. That was presumably before the public meeting which Gript attended in Stamullen that evening. The community group that had organised that meeting had been given no indication before yesterday evening that the Bettystown meeting would not take place.
The CET information supplied, in their ‘Dear John’ letter cancelling the actual engagement, merely reiterates the ‘IPAS for dummies’ explainer as to how the system is supposed to work and that Stamullen has been fortunate to have been selected for the provision of accommodation for “people who require special reception needs.”
All well and good except that none of the Statutory Instruments, some of them referenced in the CET email, and none of the EU Directives which apparently place a moral obligation on us, and not one of the planning exemptions – without any apparent formal notification even to the local authority – refer to the State having any role in buying residential homes for the accommodation of asylum seekers.
The least that the much-vaunted Community Engagement Team might have done in the case of Stamullen is to have personed up and explained face to face how all of this works to the people who live in the community in which this great experiment of ‘in-community’ integration is supposed to work.
It would seem not. As with the residents of Saggart ‘community engagement’ only seems to begin after the deed has been done. Indeed, we have previously published evidence, gleaned from Freedom of Information requests, that the Community Engagement Team only began to reach out to community groups in Saggart after the purchase of Citywest had been agreed.
One clue as to what criteria apply to this new venture into the property market might have been supplied by a reader who pointed me to Part 4 of the new International Protection Act (2026) recently signed into law by President Catherine Connolly.
Part 4 deals with the provision of accommodation to applicants for International Protection and in Section 2, under ‘material reception conditions’, it refers several times to applicants with ‘special reception needs.’
Which is the category referred to by the Community Engagement Team in its description of the persons who will be accommodated in the house owned by the Department of Justice in Stamullen.
Section 76 states that “The Minister may, where the Minister considers it necessary to do so, allocate accommodation to an applicant that is different to the accommodation previously allocated by the Minister to the applicant.”
Might that then be the clue to where the Minister for Justice can claim that he has the authority to acquire residential property in order to accommodate those persons identified as having “special reception needs?”
The CET email certainly stresses what it claims is the obligation to provide ‘in-community’ accommodation for such a category of asylum seekers and it is the rationale for why the Department has acquired the property in Forgehill and is using it for this purpose.
We await further clarification on this matter …