‘No room at the Inn: Ireland and asylum seekers’. Dr. Ciara Smyth University of Galway

Dr Ciara Smyth in conversation with Joanne Williams. Ciara Smyth is programme director of the LL.M in International Migration and Refugee Law and Policy at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, and lecturer in the School of Law, University of Galway. Her research is located at the intersection of migration, refugee and human rights law and she has published extensively on the Irish and EU asylum systems. Ciara is also involved in supporting civil society organisations working in the asylum space and was a member of the government-appointed McMahon Working Group on Direct Provision. She contributes regularly to media discussions on asylum and immigration in Ireland and the UK.

Joanne Williams has been practising as a barrister since 2010, specialising in public interest law, crime, extradition, immigration and citizenship.  Before she joined the Law Library, she was a judicial fellow assigned to the judges in charge of the High Court’s Asylum, Immigration and Citizenship List. From 2012 until 2017 she was part of an external panel established by the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner to assess a backlog of subsidiary protection applications, and she has been a part-time member of the International Protection Appeals Tribunal since 2018. She was appointed to the European Union Asylum Agency’s pool of judicial experts in 2021.