Family Reunification Campaign
Approaching your TD

Ideas for Approaching your local TD

1. Team up with others in your area
2. Call the TD’s office to ask for a meeting
3. Plan the meeting
4. The meeting
5. Follow up

Sample letter to Politicians or Councillors to request a meeting (view and print)

1.  Team up with others in your area

Organize with others to cover as many TDs as possible. Working with others is also a good way to involve people knowledgeable about the different areas covered in the campaign.

• Make a list of TD's in your area and divide up responsibility for requesting meetings. (Volunteers/interns can help with making lists of TD's). If possible, it is good to have someone at the meeting who lives or works in the TD’s constituency. (see Information for you to use)
• If you simply want to go ahead and visit one particular TD, that is great too.

2. Call the TD’s office to ask for a meeting

• Call the TD’s office and say that you would like a meeting to discuss some issues that have been identified as priority by Nasc, the Irish Immigrant Support Center and that affect people in the TD’s constituency. Try to get at least 15 minutes for the meeting, but in any case make sure you know how much time is booked for you.
• See the sample letter, if you want to send a follow up letter (this may have useful language too for a phone call explaining the request for a meeting).

3. Plan the meeting

• Once you have a meeting date, figure out who can go. For a meeting of 15 minutes or less, you may not want to have more than 3 people in the delegation (just the introductions can take up a lot of time).
• It would be good if you could mention all the issues, but you might want to focus the meeting on just one or two. (This may actually be more effective if time is limited).
• Make sure you have at least one person on the delegation who is comfortable discussing any of the issues you are focusing on.
• Consider including in the delegation someone who is or has been personally affected by one of the issues. This is a very effective way of making the problems real and allows refugees to speak on their own behalf.
• Decide in advance who is going to say what.  Plan your remarks carefully and be selective. You can’t hope to communicate everything. It is better for the TD to go away with a few clear messages, than to be confused by too much information.
• If possible, find out in advance a bit about what the TD has done or said relating to refugees and immigration.

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4. The meeting

Ideally you will have a 15-minute or longer meeting.
Below is a suggestion of how you may want to conduct the first 10 minutes, to keep the TD engaged and interested in what you are saying. If you keep your comments to no more than 10 minutes in total, you leave opportunity in a 30-minute appointment to have an engaging discussion with the TD, to get their responses and ask them for their commitments, instead of presenting to the TD for the entire meeting. Insist on a straight answer.
Does your representative agree or disagree with you?
What measures will he or she take to see that your concerns are dealt with?
This structure is meant to serve as a guideline, not as a rigid and only approach to your meeting with the TD.

a. Introduction / Ice Breaker

Start the visit by thanking the TD for their time and the opportunity to speak to them.

Explain that you are part of the campaign for Family Reunification organised by Nasc, the Irish Immigrant Support Centre.

b. Constituency Information

Identify any members of your delegation that live or work in the constituency.

Mention relevant refugee- and immigrant-serving organisations in the constituency.

If you can, link the importance of the issues to the local community.

c. Identify key issues

Mention that there are many issues of concern to Nasc, but that we have decided to highlight particularly pressing concerns at this time.

List the aims of the campaign and give the TD the one-pager outlining the purpose of the campaign.

Present one or more key issues

Have someone speak from their own experience of the problems and/or cite some local examples.

Give the TD the backgrounders on the issues.

d. Solutions/Requests to TD

Outline the recommendations that Nasc have made regarding Family Reunification.

Ask for the TD's support.

Before the meeting is over, don't forget:

• Thank You and Follow- up.
• Thank the TD for their time. Recap the commitments and promise to follow up with their office.

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5. Follow up

• Send a letter to thank the TD for the meeting and include any further information that was discussed at the meeting or that you think may underline your points.
• Send an email to Nasc, info@nascireland.org with a brief summary of how the TD responded (whether positive or negative, what questions they asked) so that we can gauge how much support we have and what kinds of arguments we need to counter.

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