IRISH IMMIGRATION LAWYERS have said the Government needs to show “actual leadership and compassion” on the matter of refugees, asylum seekers and immigration.

Speaking on Virgin Media’s The Tonight Show this week, Fianna Fáil TD Jim O’Callaghan had called for Ireland to change its approach to undocumented migrants arriving at the border. 

“If there’s a perception abroad that the system is being played, and that will arise if 5,000 people are arriving without passport documentation, well then we’re going to undermine the system,” O’Callaghan said. 

The figure refers to a recent Department of Justice report showing that between January and November 2022, a total of 5,074 people applying for asylum in Ireland presented either “false or no documentation”.

However, immigration lawyers are at pains to point out “there is no such thing as an asylum visa”, and that these figures must be understood in the context of the hard reality facing those who are seeking asylum from war, violence, persecution and humanitarian crisis.

Wendy Lyon, an Irish immigration and human rights solicitor and partner at the Abbey Law firm, points out that it is rarely possible to seek asylum in Ireland using proper documentation. 

“Say you’re a gay Georgian asylum seeker and you want to come to Ireland, you can’t just get on a plane and come here with your passport, because you need a visa to come to Ireland. You can’t get a visa, because visas are rarely given to people from refugee-producing countries,” she says.

It’s not possible to say ‘I want to apply for a visa so I can seek asylum.’ You would be refused out of hand.”

Lyon, who has been practicing immigration law in Ireland since 2014, explains that to circumnavigate this, individuals will procure a false document from an agent, who will often travel with the asylum seeker and take the document back at the end of the trip, due to the document’s high-value. 

Cathal Malone, an immigration lawyer with Thomas Coughlan & Co, echoed the view that countries that generate asylum seekers aren’t often in the business of efficiently handing out passports and permitting leaves of absence. 

“Eritrea is often called the North Korea of Africa, because Eritreans can’t even leave their country without an ‘exit visa’, which are never granted. I could go through dozens of countries and the reasons why people can’t get national passports or permission to leave their country, so it’s not as simple as people in the West, where it’s easy to get a passport and travel across borders on them, might think.”

Malone also cites the example of Afghanistan, another significant driver of asylum seekers, which has stopped giving out passports since the Taliban regained control of the government in late 2021. 

The discussion comes at a time when far-right demonstrations, fuelled by misinformation, are making claims about “unvetted” people coming into Ireland in huge numbers.

As The Journal FactCheck reporter Shane Raymond noted in a recent debunk of the claim that “approximately 100,000 unvetted foreign nationals” received free accommodation in Ireland in 2021, a “SIS II” check is carried out on all people entering the state to identify missing or wanted people. That is to say, a background check. 

The very real lack of accommodation in Ireland, and the very real housing crisis, has been used by the far-right to promote the ‘Ireland is Full’ hashtag that has become popular on social media, though the crisis level of Ireland’s accommodation supply predates the recent humanitarian disasters in Afghanistan and Ukraine.

Lyon says there has been years of “failure to provide accommodation and failure to provide resources, that can easily give rise to resentment among people who feel like they have lost out”.

Ukraine, and so-called safe countries

Around 70,000 Ukrainians have come to Ireland since the onset of Russia’s invasion in February 2022 – a number roughly 27 times higher than asylum seekers from the rest of the world combined.

But in many respects, Georgia is Ukraine-before-Ukraine. Invaded by Russia in 2008, Georgia faced the displacement of 192,000 people, and a new geopolitical landscape beside the same aggressive neighbour that would go on to invade Crimea in 2014, and then Ukraine at large.

Ireland’s Department of Justice has designated Georgia as a “safe country of origin” since 2018, even though significant areas remain occupied by Russian forces, and Russia’s expansionist foreign policy remains evident.  

As Malone puts it, international protection applicants from Georgia and Albania are little more than a “rounding error” in the grand scheme of things. In 2021, Ireland received 403 applications for asylum from Georgia and Albania, accepting just 15 of them – a number which rose to 41 after review.

In terms of Albania, Malone points out that individual circumstances, such as “a long history of blood feuds between families where the government is unable or unwilling to step in” and human trafficking play a major role in causing people to seek asylum. 

The highest number of non-Ukrainian applicants in the most recent available data come from Nigeria. Of the 451 who applied, 74 were eventually approved for international protection status, making up about 0.1% of the total of refugees in Ireland when taking Ukrainians into account.

“People complain that asylum seekers get appeal after appeal after appeal,” Lyon says. “That’s not true. There’s one appeal on an international protection application and if that appeal is unsuccessful, you can’t appeal again. You can only ask for a judicial review – that if a judge is satisfied that there has been error of law or an error of fact, and that’s a pretty high threshold.”

Speaking this week in Brussels, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said that Ireland’s asylum system must not be seen abroad as “easy to play”, saying that EU countries had to be “fair, firm and hard” on immigration. Acting Minister for Justice Simon Harris has also recently gone on record to point out that Ireland deports people “every single month”, including 130 people in January.

Harris went on to say in the Dáil that “Immigration Officials in my Department are actively engaging with airport authorities and airlines at a senior level to underscore the importance of passengers possessing correct documentation and to provide support in helping them to reduce the number of passengers boarding flights without the correct documentation”.

It is a line that Lyon believes “almost vindicates what those people [far-right protesters] are saying, by promising to crack down on all of these people abusing the system, rather than showing actual leadership and saying ‘We’re going to keep looking after these people because it’s the right thing to do’.”

Malone argues that it is unlikely that prospective asylum seekers would see the Irish system as easy to play.

On Friday evening, the Department of Integration confirmed to The Journal that since 24 January, a total of 485 people have sought International Protection in Ireland.

There are currently 139 applicants “whom the Department has been unable to offer accommodation”. 

“Today, there are more than 100 people sleeping rough in Dublin who have applied for protection and have nowhere to live,” Malone says. 

“I don’t know that changing the nuances of asylum law and procedure is going to filter through to people fleeing these hotspots if the fact that they’re going to wind up with a €50 Dunnes voucher and told to sleep on the street in the middle of February doesn’t do it.”