As ever, at least in recent times, the establishment is only forced to pay serious heed to an important and troubling issue when something truly terrible happens. It’s long past time for a frank public discussion on those who pretend to be underage in order to benefit from our chaotic, easy-to-exploit, asylum system.
On Wednesday a young Ukrainian – 17-year-old Vadym Davydenko – died after a “frenzied” knife attack in an apartment where he was bring housed by Tusla with unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. Matt Treacy broke the news on this platform that a previous request to have an apartment in the Grattan Wood complex exempt from planning for change of use for the purpose of providing refugee care to minors had been refused by Dublin City Council.
He noted that a company called Baig and Mizra, who made the failed planning application, are one of the major contractors who provide care services to Tusla. “Last year it was revealed that the company had received more than €43 million in payments from Tusla since 2020″, and its ultimate owners are Muhammad Usman Baig and Farhan Mirza.”
In addition, the Irish Times also reported that the apartment in which the young Ukrainian was stabbed is an “unregulated emergency placement run by a private care provider”.
An appalling and terrifying murder of a seventeen-year-old boy, who may have come here to escape the terror of being conscripted and dragged to the front, has now occurred. The brutal killing in Grattan Wood in Donaghmede is now a matter for An Garda Síochana and for the courts. We cannot make any comment on this case.
Separately, there is an urgent need for a broader review of how the State verifies the identity and background of individuals presenting as asylum seekers – including their age, criminal history, and mental health status. These are complex and sensitive assessments, but they are essential to ensure that those entering the system are properly identified and that vulnerable people, both migrants and residents, are protected.
“ADULTS PRETENDING TO BE CHILDREN”
As far back as 2016, the then head of Tusla – Ireland’s child and family agency, said “one of the biggest challenges for the State when it comes to unaccompanied migrant children is verifying their ages”.
The first intake of migrant children from Calais arrived in Britain this week and there were criticisms of the age assessment process, amid speculation in some media outlets that some of the young men may be over 18.
In an interview with TheJournal.ie on October 2016, chief executive of Tusla, Fred McBride, said it was a problem his agency faced.
“Some of them are not children, they’re actually adults pretending to be children. So, actually getting verification of their age is a challenge and some will flee immediately on landing at the port or airport,” he said.
They’ll just disappear into the communities and it’s very difficult to know where they’ve gone or to track them at all unless them come up through other channels – the guards, or housing and so on.
He revealed that in 2014, Tusla’s team for children who had become separated from their families before seeking asylum received 97 referrals. In 2015, it received 109 referrals. Those numbers have, as we know, now exploded.
Prior to that Tusla admission, when we spoke more openly on these matters perhaps, it was acknowledged in 2014 that “adult seekers who lie about their age are attending Irish second-level schools alongside pupils as young as 12.”
Emma Quinn, a co-ordinator with the Irish National Contact Point (NCP) of the European Migration Network (EMN), told the Independent that “adult asylum seekers successfully passing themselves off as teenagers is a problem which is unlikely to be “fully eradicated”.”
They are generally male, aged up to 21, and arrive in Ireland with such little personal information that immigration staff here have to guess their age.
The newly arrived immigrants do not admit their real age to try and bolster their refugee claims in a desperate bid to stay in the country.
She said that “some asylum seekers don’t have any documentation to prove their age, so they tell the authorities they are minors, simply to gain entry into the country,” and added “that age is accepted unless there is reason to suspect the person is lying.”
“And while they can legally be refused entry into the State, it is Ireland’s policy and practice not to return a child to another country without their parents. So they’ll be allowed in and the social workers may have to make a call on their age.”
Ms Quinn is likely correct that this is a problem that is difficult to eradicate, but its likely that the extraordinarily reckless policy of allowing thousands of people to enter the country without passports and allow them claim asylum didn’t help – in that same way that it’s likely that the decision of Roderic O’Gorman to tell the world that Ireland was the land of milk and honey for migrants seeking asylum created an impression that we were a soft touch. We now have acknowledgment that more than 80% of such asylum claims are bogus, of course, but it’s a little late for that.
NUMBERS ARE “UNPRECDENTED”
In just the first seven months of 2022, 167 unaccompanied minors seeking protection were with Tusla. These were “unprecedented numbers” and the pressure and the availability and supply of suitable placements was increasing significantly, the agency said.
But by April 2024, 607 unaccompanied children had been referred to Ireland’s Separated Children Seeking International Protection (SCSIP) service, in just the previous 15 months with 243 of them arriving in the first three months of 2024 alone.
Then in August 2024, it was revealed that the Department of Children had “flagged concerns” that “in some cases, adults were claiming to be under 18 years of age in initial interviews with staff from the International Protection Office”.
Some adult asylum seekers may be claiming to be minors when arriving in the Republic, adding to “severe demands” on an already under-strain system for unaccompanied child asylum seekers, internal department briefings have warned.
Briefing notes from department officials state that these asylum seekers were later “assessed” to be adults, “or report afterwards that they are adults”. This was “adding to the already severe demands” on the system, the briefing said.
When a person claiming asylum alleged they were a minor, the preliminary interview with international protection staff was suspended and the person was “immediately referred” to Tusla, the child and family agency, the briefing stated. There was a need for international protection officials to conduct “a more in-depth interview” before the case was handed over to the Tusla team responsible for unaccompanied minors, it stated.
The briefing notes were only released under FOI to Aontú’s Peadar Tóibín. At the time, Tusla said that the assessment by social workers of asylum seekers claim to be under 18 looked at their journey, family network and personal and social development. “In some instances, the young person is determined not to be eligible, but wherever doubt exists the benefit of the doubt is given,” a spokesman said.
The extent to which the benefit of doubt may be given may be seen in the fact that Tusla said that there were no exact figures on the extent of the problem – and that a 2022 investigation found that “62 asylum-seeking children had disappeared from State care after arriving in Ireland alone”.
WHAT TUSLA TOLD ME
I wrote to Tusla last year looking for information on this issue and they told me that 432 newly arrived children who were seeking International Protection or Beneficiaries of Temporary Protection (BOTP) from Ukraine were admitted to care/accommodated by Tusla in 2023, 154 (55%) more than 2022 (278).
Of these, 40% (171/432) of children admitted to care/accommodated in 2023 were from Ukraine. The remaining 60% (261/432) of children were from about 30 different countries with the most common being Somalia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Algeria, Congo, Pakistan and Nigeria.
On December 31, 2024, there were 448 unaccompanied international protection applicant/BOTP children/young people accommodated in Tusla supported services.
And they said that “approximately three quarters of newly arrived unaccompanied children are aged 16 and 17 on arrival to Ireland.”
That’s a very telling piece of data in my opinion. Three quarters of the total means that hundreds of migrants have arrived here claiming to be under-aged asylum seekers, but are telling Tusla they are aged 16 or 17. These aren’t children or young teens then. They could easily be “adults pretending to be children”, as Tusla has previously found.
Obviously, it would be important to know how many of these unaccompanied young people claiming to be 16 or 17 had passports or a means of verification of identity. I asked Tusla that question – but that information is only kept on individual case files, I was told.
There are clearly huge safety issues at play here, especially given that some of these supposed minors will be placed in schools and with other vulnerable young people. Yet, as ever, those obvious concerns never get an airing from our disinterested media, who are more concerned about punching down on ordinary people expressing concern about immigration.
Other jurisdictions are catching up to the problem. In Britain, in the first half of 2024 alone, 1,317 migrants – a record number – were “caught pretending to be children”, the Sun reported.
A total of 1,317 migrants claiming to be minors at the border were judged to be adults brazenly plotting to gain extra protection from being sent home.
The British government says it will now use AI technology to verify the age of migrants that claim to be children after a independent immigration inspector found that 56% of migrants who claimed to be children “were either assessed to be adults or later admitted they were 18 or over”. Will that also be taken up here? Or will our plethora of taxpayer-funded NGOs intervene to claim a supposed human rights violation on behalf of those who are lying to the Irish authorities.
As with most difficulties or controversies around the thorny issue of immigration, the media and political establishment are engaged in a great pretence which has reduced them to the level of the three monkeys: deaf and blind to any obvious problem until it can no longer be ignored.