08/09/2026
These appeals must be prioritised.
Appeals can take up to a year to process and the students in Gaza will lose their places in Irish Universities unless the Department of Justice agrees to process them immediately.
We are seeing visa refusals on the basis that original documents could not be provided. In Gaza, however, there is no functioning postal service through which these documents can be sent. This is a practical impossibility, rather than a failure on the part of the applicants.
We are also seeing multiple refusals where applicants have been criticised for failing to provide explanations for gaps in their education or employment history. Many applicants understandably believed that the reasons for these gaps over the past three years were self-evident.
The distress, disappointment and overwhelming grief experienced by these students is difficult to put into words. They have already endured extraordinary hardship and now face the prospect of losing hard-won opportunities to study because their appeals cannot be determined quickly enough.
These cases require urgent and compassionate consideration.
The issue is not simply whether these students will receive visas. It is whether they will be given a fair opportunity to have their circumstances properly considered before the opportunity to study is lost.
