Department of Justice officials have been instructed to look at using charter flights to deport unsuccessful International Protection applicants, Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan has said.
The Government will, he said, be “chartering flights to remove people who aren’t entitled to be here and have received a deportation order”.
A total of 2,403 deportation orders were signed and issued to failed asylum applicants last year, an increase of 180 per cent on the previous 12 months.
Mr O’Callaghan said Ireland will be using Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, “much more” in the future.
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He told Virgin Media’s Tonight Show that the State would be “buying seats” on flights chartered by the agency to return unsuccessful applicants to their countries of origin, but he could not give a commitment as to when this would happen.
“If we want to have an effective asylum system, there has to be a consequence for people who at the end of the process are told, ‘Sorry, you haven’t met the standard, you’re not entitled to asylum’,” Mr O’Callaghan said.
“Too many people are coming in claiming asylum when they’re not entitled to asylum, and the real losers in that situation are the people coming in who are entitled to asylum but, because of the heavy pressures on the accommodation system and because of the heavy pressures on processing, their claims don’t get heard early enough and they don’t get accommodation.”
It is very difficult, at a time when we have full employment in the Irish economy, to try and attract people into An Garda Síochána
His predecessor in the department, Helen McEntee, last summer launched a procurement process for charter flights with a view to giving gardaí more options when executing deportation orders. A tender was awarded late last year.
On the overall volume of asylum cases, Mr O’Callaghan said there were 14,000 applications processed last year, with some two thirds of these rejected at the first instance. So far this year, he said, 80 per cent of applications have been rejected, though a significant number of refusals are appealed.
Separately, the Minister said he wants to “get in as many gardaí as possible in the next number of years”, to bolster the current figure, which he put at 14,100.
However, he said, “it is very difficult, at a time when we have full employment in the Irish economy, to try and attract people into An Garda Síochána”.
On prison overcrowding, Mr O’Callaghan said prison spaces should be used for “people who are violent”, outlining plans to advance legislation on community sanctions as an alternative method to “provide punishment” for non-violent prisoners.
“I don’t want to see our prisons clogged up with people who are in there for crimes of shoplifting or people who have addiction issues, they shouldn’t be in prison – but people who are violent and who are a threat to the Irish public need to be put in prison,” he said.
