The Irish landscape

Ireland’s relationship with forced displacement has undergone profound transformation over the past three decades. From a country of historical emigration, it has become a significant destination for people seeking protection – a transition shaped by European policy, global crises, and the largest refugee influx the state has ever experienced.

The primary legal route through which most refugees enter the Irish system is the international protection process, governed by the International Protection Act 2015. Applicants must demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group (Stapleton et al. Reference Stapleton, Polakowski and Quinn2022). While awaiting a decision – a process that can be protracted – applicants are accommodated under the International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS). This is the successor to the much-criticised Direct Provision system. By early 2026, more than 104,000 people were residing in state-provided accommodation, with occupancy rates above 96%, reflecting a system under acute and sustained pressure (O’Callaghan et al. Reference O’Callaghan, O’Riordan and Pennisi2021).

Direct Provision came into operation in 2000, becoming a defining and deeply contested feature of Ireland’s approach to asylum seekers. Characterised by congregate living, restricted autonomy, limited cooking facilities, and long periods of enforced idleness, the system drew extensive criticism from human rights organisations and residents alike. Research by Watters et al. (Reference Watters, Mowlds, O’Connor and Sarma2022) exploring the lived experiences of Programme Refugees – those granted refugee status under the Irish Refugee and Protection programme – illustrated how time spent in temporary state accommodation had a measurable negative impact on psychological wellbeing. Participants described feelings of helplessness, boredom, and loss of control that persisted independently of the safety and basic needs the accommodation provided (Watters et al. Reference Watters, Mowlds, O’Connor and Sarma2022). In 2021, the government published a White Paper committing to the abolition of Direct Provision and its replacement with a community-based model. Implementation has been uneven, hampered by Ireland’s housing crisis (NASC 2022).

Alongside the international protection system, a second and distinctly gendered pathway emerged following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Ireland activated the EU Temporary Protection Directive, affording Ukrainians immediate residency rights, access to employment, healthcare, education, and social welfare without undergoing the standard asylum process. By early 2026, approximately 125,700 Ukrainian people had arrived in Ireland – around 90% of adult beneficiaries being women with children. This demographic profile reflects the gendered nature of the conflict, with men of fighting age largely prevented from leaving Ukraine, and the particular vulnerability of women-headed households in displacement. Many Ukrainian women have entered the Irish workforce, enrolled children in schools, and participated in local community life (Central Statistics Office 2025). Ireland has extended legal protections for this cohort until at least March 2027.

Yet the picture is not uniform. Women asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Sudan, Pakistan and elsewhere navigate a significantly more demanding legal and administrative pathway. Processed through the international protection system rather than the accelerated Temporary Protection route, they may spend prolonged periods in IPAS accommodation awaiting decisions. Research consistently identifies lengthy processing times, lack of privacy, restricted agency, and inadequate responses to trauma and mental health needs as features of their experience (AkiDwA 2020). A recent report by the Irish Centre for Human Rights on behalf of Doras highlighted overcrowding and lack of oversight in emergency accommodation (Doras 2026). This two-tier system, where the speed and terms of protection vary substantially by nationality, has drawn criticism from NGOs and legal advocates on grounds of equity and consistency.

The policy landscape governing refugee integration in Ireland is fragmented. The Migrant Integration Strategy (2017–2021) operated as the primary framework for integration policy but has been criticised for a mainstreaming approach that failed to address the specific and compounding disadvantages faced by women. As Stapleton and colleagues (Reference Stapleton, Polakowski and Quinn2022) document in a comprehensive ESRI report, migrant women are not specifically addressed in the strategy, and gender is not mainstreamed within national integration policy. Non-EU migrant women display persistently higher rates of unemployment and lower labour market participation than Irish women, alongside disproportionate rates of overcrowded housing, unmet medical need, and exposure to gender-based violence; they remain politically underrepresented and often excluded from the policy processes that shape their lives (Stapleton et al. Reference Stapleton, Polakowski and Quinn2022).

Housing remains the most acute structural challenge. Single mothers and women-headed households face particular barriers in accessing secure accommodation, and advocacy groups have warned that phasing out state accommodation for some cohorts risks pushing vulnerable refugee women and families into homelessness in a context of severe housing shortage. Refugee women arrive carrying significant pre-migration trauma into a housing system already at breaking point; the Irish health and social care system has been ill-equipped to absorb the convergence of pressures (Irish Refugee Council 2026).

Ireland has, in many respects, demonstrated genuine commitment to refugee protection – in its response to the Ukrainian crisis, in its per capita intake relative to EU peers, and in the legal frameworks it has established. But good intent at the level of policy has repeatedly been undermined by operational pressures, systemic gaps, and a persistent failure to recognise refugee women as a population with distinct and layered needs.

Intersectionality

The concept of intersectionality was first articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It describes how race and gender combine to produce distinct forms of disadvantage. It has since been extended to capture the overlapping and mutually constitutive effects of multiple social positions – including ethnicity, religion, language, age, disability, and care responsibilities (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw2022). For refugee women in Ireland, these dimensions interact in ways that generate qualitatively different, and often more severe, experiences of exclusion than any single axis of disadvantage might predict.

Motherhood is perhaps the most immediately visible of these compounding factors in the Irish context. Research on Ukrainian women who arrived under Temporary Protection found that while many entered employment and community life, those with young children faced substantially greater barriers to labour market participation, language acquisition, and social contact (Gheorghiev Reference Gheorghiev2025; Kelly et al. Reference Kelly, Bennett, Moriarty, Cubie, Forde, McCarthy, McGeady, Balfe, Barry and O’Neill2022). These findings are not specific to Ireland: A large-scale longitudinal study of refugees in Germany demonstrated that the gender employment gap, already present on arrival, widened significantly over subsequent years. This gap was driven primarily not by women’s lower aspirations or human capital deficits, but by the disproportionate weight of childcare responsibilities and their diminishing returns to health and social capital over time (Kosyakova et al. Reference Kosyakova, Salikutluk and Hartmann2023). In Ireland, where formal childcare remains expensive and access for IPAS residents is uneven, mothers encounter this as a structural barrier to participation in language courses, employment programmes, and even routine healthcare appointments (Watters et al. Reference Watters, Mowlds, O’Connor and Sarma2022).

Language intersects with almost every other dimension of disadvantage. Women with limited English face compounded barriers: they are less able to navigate health and legal systems, less likely to form bridging social ties with Irish people, and more dependent on male family members or community intermediaries. Research by Walawender et al. (2024) on Ukrainian refugees in Poland and Hungary found that higher personal resources and social support were directly linked to stronger job expectations and lower submissiveness in the labour market; a lack of social capital, however, undermined both (Walawender et al. Reference Walawender, Liszka and Szczygieł2023). Language is a form of social capital, and its absence operates cumulatively: women who cannot communicate in English are less likely to attend language courses (often due to care responsibilities), less likely to establish the contacts that generate employment information, and more likely to remain socially isolated. For non-European women in particular – those from Afghanistan, Somalia, or Nigeria navigating the international protection process – language barriers compound the already precarious legal pathway they face (Stapleton et al. Reference Stapleton, Polakowski and Quinn2022).

Religion and ethnicity add further dimensions. Muslim women, and in particular those who wear a headscarf, face documented discrimination in European labour markets. Studies from Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain reporting lower call-back rates and employer stereotyping that operates independently of qualifications (Fernández-Reino et al. Reference Fernández-Reino, Di Stasio and Veit2023). Ireland is not immune to these dynamics. At the same time, for many women, religious identity and community represent a critical source of social capital and psychological grounding. The relationship between religion and integration is therefore not straightforwardly one of obstacle; it shapes both vulnerability and resilience, depending heavily on the surrounding social context.

A framework that holds these multiple dimensions simultaneously is often absent from Irish policy, and even clinical practice. A healthcare appointment, an employment support session, or a housing assessment that addresses gender without attending to ethnicity, language, or care responsibilities will fail to capture the lived experience and intersecting dimensions of a person’s life. Intersectionality is not merely a conceptual lens; in the context of refugee women’s access to care and social participation in Ireland, it is a practical imperative.

Mental health burden and barriers to mental health care

The mental health burden borne by refugee women in Ireland is substantial and well-documented. Irish studies point unambiguously to markedly elevated rates of psychopathology in this population. A study in inner-city Dublin found a lifetime prevalence of PTSD of 47% among refugees and asylum seekers, compared with 6% in a native Irish group (Wilson et al. Reference Wilson, Hennessy, Dooley, Kelly and Ryan2013). A cross-sectional study of asylum seekers and refugees in the west of Ireland found that those seeking asylum were six times more likely to report symptoms of PTSD, depression, or anxiety than those granted refugee status – a disparity attributed primarily to the post-migration stressors of Direct Provision, insecure residency, and enforced idleness (Toar et al. Reference Toar, OBrien and Fahey2009). Asylum seekers are at particular risk precisely because their mental health depends not only on treatment but on the remediation of those structural conditions (O’Connell et al. Reference O’Connell, Duffy and Crumlish2016).

For refugee women specifically, the trauma profile is distinctive and often under-recognised. The gender-specific traumatic events many women carry – sexual violence, forced marriage, honour-based violence, and genital mutilation – are less likely to be disclosed in standard clinical assessments. Such experiences are more likely to produce shame, self-blame, and profound distrust of institutions. The traumas most commonly associated with PTSD in women are rape and sexual molestation, not combat exposure, yet clinical tools and therapeutic frameworks have historically been developed with male conflict survivors in mind (Schouler-Ocak and Kastrup Reference Schouler-Ocak, Kastrup, Polakowski and Quinn2019).

The barriers to accessing mental healthcare are multiple and mutually reinforcing. Language is the most immediate: it is, as Schouler-Ocak (Reference Schouler-Ocak and Schouler-Ocak2015a) observes, the main working tool of psychiatry and psychotherapy, without which successful communication is impossible (Schouler-Ocak Reference Schouler-Ocak2015b). Cultural understandings of mental distress compound this: in many communities from which refugee women come, psychological suffering is expressed somatically, framed in spiritual or religious terms, or understood through idioms of distress that have no direct equivalent in biomedical psychiatry. Refugee women, presenting with headaches, chest pain, or fatigue rather than “depression” or “PTSD,” risk having their mental health needs missed entirely at the first point of contact (Fenta et al. Reference Fenta, Hyman and Noh2004).

At the systemic level, gaps in Ireland remain. Mental health support for refugees and asylum seekers relies on a mix of specialist services – including Spirasi, Jesuit Refugee Service Ireland, Irish Red Cross, Doras, and Safetynet – alongside overstretched public systems and NGOs (HSE 2025). Refugees depend heavily on the same HSE mental health infrastructure as the general population. There has been genuine progress: compared with five years ago, there is greater recognition that refugee mental health requires interpreters, intercultural competence, community-based support, and trauma-informed approaches (Department of Health 2025). However, services are still widely viewed as reactive rather than integrated or adequately resourced, and specialist capacity remains modest relative to current need. The result is that the women carrying the greatest trauma burden – those who are most multiply disadvantaged, most distrustful, and most practically constrained – are also the least likely to receive care adequate to their needs.

Protective factors and resilience

Literature on the mental health of refugee women has long been dominated by what Watters et al. (Reference Watters, Mowlds, O’Connor and Sarma2022) describe as a medical model preoccupied with deficiency: counting disorders, cataloguing trauma, and measuring dysfunction (Watters et al. Reference Watters, Mowlds, O’Connor and Sarma2022). This framing, while not without clinical utility, risks rendering refugee women as passive bearers of pathology rather than as individuals who have demonstrated capacity to survive, adapt, and rebuild under conditions of extreme adversity. To gain a better understanding of the experience and perspectives of refugee women in Ireland an exploration of protective factors and sources of resilience is called for. These factors exist alongside, and interact with, the vulnerabilities described above.

Social connection is consistently the most powerful protective factor identified in the literature. Qualitative research with Programme Refugees resettled in the west of Ireland found that relationships, with neighbours, colleagues, resettlement workers, and previously settled community members, were experienced as transformative (Watters et al. Reference Watters, Mowlds, O’Connor and Sarma2022). Participants described feeling respected and valued by their communities in terms that speak directly to agency and self-worth: to be treated, as one participant put it, as a human being rather than a refugee. These connections functioned not only as sources of practical support but as psychological anchors – fostering a sense of belonging, and buffering the ongoing grief and loss inherent in resettlement. This is consistent with the broader evidence base: Walawender et al. (Reference Walawender, Liszka and Szczygieł2023) found that higher personal resource assessment – which encompasses social support, perceived connection, and a sense of belonging – was the strongest predictor of positive job expectations and reduced submissiveness among Ukrainian refugees in Poland and Hungary (Walawender et al. Reference Walawender, Liszka and Szczygieł2023). Social capital is not incidental to resilience; it is constitutive of it.

Religious and cultural identity are sources of resilience that clinical services in Ireland have been slow to recognise. Watters et al. (Reference Watters, Mowlds, O’Connor and Sarma2022) found that religious belief functioned as a significant resource for managing distress. It provised not only comfort but an interpretive framework that gave meaning to suffering and supported acceptance of difficult circumstances (Watters et al. Reference Watters, Mowlds, O’Connor and Sarma2022). This was not passivity but an active coping strategy, one that had sustained participants through conditions that formal mental health services had often not reached. Schouler-Ocak and Kastrup (Reference Schouler-Ocak and Kastrup2019) similarly notes that cultural and spiritual frameworks shape how distress is understood and processed, and that interventions which work with these frameworks are more likely to be trusted and sustained (Schouler-Ocak and Kastrup Reference Schouler-Ocak, Kastrup, Polakowski and Quinn2019). For many refugee women, identity is also expressed through vocational skill and cultural practice carried from home countries. Skills such as cooking, textile work, beauty practices, community caregiving represent competence, continuity, and self-worth (Lau and Rodgers Reference Lau and Rodgers2021). These are not peripheral concerns, but a substrate from which psychological stability is rebuilt.

The role of peer support and community-led intervention deserves particular emphasis. Participants in the Watters et al. (Reference Watters, Mowlds, O’Connor and Sarma2022) study specifically identified support from other refugees – those who had navigated the Irish system before them – as invaluable, offering the credibility of shared experience that no professional can replicate (Watters et al. Reference Watters, Mowlds, O’Connor and Sarma2022). Organisations such as AkiDwA, led by migrant women, ground their work in the lived experience of those it serves. They have long-since demonstrated the distinctive value of community-based approaches to mental health and social participation among refugee women in Ireland. This model – sometimes described as peer-informed or community-led, rather than service-delivered – is often accessible, culturally attuned, and more trusted than statutory provision alone.

Services designed to support resilience cannot substitute for the structural conditions that make resilience possible. The most effective strategy is one that builds on the strengths refugee women already possess – their social bonds, their cultural knowledge, their determination – while removing the structural barriers that prevent those strengths from being mobilised.

The role of social inclusion

The mental health of refugee women in Ireland cannot be addressed by mental health services alone. The conditions that generate and sustain psychological distress – insecure housing, enforced idleness, exclusion from the labour market, restricted access to education, and barriers to community participation – are social in origin and require social solutions. This is not a peripheral observation but the central argument of the social determinants framework: that health outcomes, and mental health outcomes in particular, are shaped by the material and relational conditions in which people live (Friedli and Organization Reference Friedli and Organization2009). Social exclusion is not a consequence of poor mental health; it is among its primary causes, and the two reinforce one another in cycles that, if left unaddressed, compound over time (Boardman Reference Boardman2011). Housing is the most foundational of these determinants. The loss of autonomy, enforced routine, and absence of meaningful activity that can occur in congregate settings directly generate the pervasive distress that contributes to clinical presentation. Having a home creates the conditions – privacy, control, routine, the capacity to care for oneself and one’s children – from which psychological recovery becomes possible. For refugee women in Ireland still living in overstretched IPAS accommodation, this precondition for mental health remains withheld.

Employment carries similarly significant mental health value, extending well beyond income. For refugees in Ireland, paid work provides not only financial security but a means of learning the language, building social networks, acquiring cultural knowledge, and demonstrating contribution to the host society – thereby reducing the sense of burden that many internalise. Boardman (Reference Boardman2011) note that productive and valued activity is one of the central capability domains through which social inclusion is achieved, and that its absence is a reliable predictor of worsening mental health (Boardman Reference Boardman2011). For refugee women, the obstacles to employment – language, childcare, non-recognition of credentials, discrimination – are therefore simultaneously barriers to mental health. Policies facilitating women’s access to the labour market, including investment in affordable childcare, flexible language training, and recognition of foreign qualifications, are mental health interventions, even when not framed as such.

Education and community participation function in the same way. Access to education generates social capital, expands social networks and restores a sense of purposeful forward movement that is itself protective. Community participation, including involvement in civic and voluntary life builds what Boardman (Reference Boardman2011) describe as bonding and bridging social capital: the close ties that provide emotional support and the broader connections that provide access to resources and opportunities (Boardman Reference Boardman2011). Their systematic unavailability to refugee women, owing to structural barriers that are well-documented, constitutes a failure of both integration policy and mental health policy simultaneously.

The implication for Ireland is a challenge to the conventional separation of responsibilities between the health system, housing authorities, employment services, and integration agencies. The mental health of refugee women will not be improved by clinical services alone while the social conditions that generate distress remain unchanged. What is required is a joined-up approach that recognises social inclusion as a public mental health strategy – one in which stable housing, accessible employment, education, and genuine community participation are understood not as welfare concessions but as foundational conditions for psychological health.