Earlier this month, we reported that there had been a significant increase in the number of persons who, having being granted asylum, have also been approved for bringing family members to Ireland under the Family Reunification process in the period from 2019-2024.
However, that data showed a big surge in the number of approvals – they tripled from 265 persons approved in 2019 to 983 approvals in 2024, with a total of 3,071 applications approved from 2019 to May 7, 2025. However, the data from the Department of Justice did not say how many persons subsequently entered the country on foot of each approval.
That number would obviously vary from family to family: sometimes, one presumes, its a matter of bringing a spouse, while other families will bring spouses and children and sometimes other family members. In this case before the Irish courts in 2020, a Somalian woman who had been granted refugee status in Ireland had “got permission for her children, her mother and her wards to join her here”, and was now seeking permission for her husband to also be allowed to come to Ireland under family reunification.
That’s a lot of people being added to the system under one initial application. At least 7, in fact, in this case if the wards and children are estimated at a minimum of 2 as the use of the plural in each case signifies. A surge in approvals of Family Reunifications will obviously impact on the subsequent demands on housing and health and other services.
But is the example above – of one person bringing at least 6 others typical? What does the data tell us? That data wasn’t, oddly enough, included in the answer released to Carol Nolan by the Minister for Justice, so Deputy Nolan asked a follow-up question – how many people had come to reside in the state on the basis of Family Reunification, an important statistic, one would imagine given the huge strain on services causing so much difficulty at the moment.
To ask the Minister for Justice further to Parliamentary Question No. 902 of 13 May 2025, if the numbers approved for Family Reunification under Section 56 of the 2015 Act from 2019, up to 7 May 2025 refers to the number of applications approved or the numbers of persons granted permission to enter and reside in the state; if the latter, the total number of persons to enter and reside for each year from 2019 to date in 2025; and if he will make a statement on the matter.
The reply from the Minister won’t surprise anyone endlessly frustrated by the inability of the state to keep basic data around many important issues, but especially immigration. In short, yes, the earlier data did only refer to the number of applications approved – but the state does not record statistics on the number of people who arrive in the country to take up residency on the basis that a person who has been granted asylum here wants to also bring their family for reunification.
I can inform the Deputy that the information provided in Parliamentary Question 902 of 13 May 2025 relates to the number of people that have been granted permission under section 56 of the 2015 Act.
Statistics on those that arrive in the State to take up residency on the basis of their family reunification permission are not recorded in the manner requested by the Deputy. While the Registration Office within Immigration Service Delivery (ISD) of my Department record each individual immigration permission with the category of the stamp being granted, differentiation and sub-totals within each stamp category are not recorded in a manner that allows the information requested to be easily extracted.
That’s all mightily convenient isn’t it? There’s a massive surge in people who have been granted asylum getting the right to bring their families here but the State is clueless as to what the actual effect of that is. It’s always easier, isn’t it, not to be answerable for the impact of policy on the demand for services, especially housing, when you can simply say the data is not recorded.
In 2023, then Minister for Justice, Simon Harris said that the Family Reunification Unit in his Department had 631 applications from refugees for 1,934 family members – and that in 2022 there had been 760 family reunification applications for 2,245 family members under the International Protection Act.
That seemed to give an average of three persons expected to arrive per applicant – which would allow an estimate of almost an additional 3,000 arrivals for the 983 approvals in 2024 alone. Did an additional 9,000 persons arrive under family reunification in the period from 2019 to May 7, 2025 based on the approval of 3,071 applications? Again, we don’t know. But we’re left with estimates precisely because the Department says the actual information is “not recorded in a manner that allows the information to be easily extracted”.
One reaches the inescapable conclusion that that last phrase just about sums up the government’s entire attitude to the great migration mess that is of their own making.
A few weeks ago, the Department of Integration admitted that it didn’t know how many hotel rooms were contracted to asylum accommodation, for example. Information that revealed that fingerprints of asylum applicants were not, in fact, checked against a criminal database had to be dragged out of them. And on and on infinitum, as housing inflation keeps inexorably rising – prices up another 7.5% today – and healthcare waiting lists keep growing, and the Cabinet just sticks in head, ostrich-like, into the sand.