When the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission isn’t funding misleading ‘Trans Rights’ guides using taxpayer money, it’s using taxpayer money to fund court cases against the State on the grounds that it’s failing to uphold the rights of homeless asylum seekers.
This is not a new case. IHREC first brought proceedings against the State at the end of 2023, and actually won in 2024 when the High Court ruled that the State had breached the rights of 2,807 single male international protection applicants in failing to accommodate them.
However, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision last year, ruling that the Commission had failed to prove that the physical or mental health of international protection applicants was undermined or in a state of degradation incompatible with human dignity.
Following the overruling, the Commission was granted leave by the Supreme Court to appeal the Court of Appeal’s decision, taking us up to yesterday, when the Supreme Court began its consideration of IHREC’s case that the State has failed to uphold the rights of homeless asylum seekers.
According to The Journal, senior counsel for IHREC Eoin McCullough told the court that the State had breached the rights of a “uniquely vulnerable class of people”.
As per the same report:
“He said this was because when asylum seekers arrive in Ireland, they are unlikely to have a support network, they are arriving on the basis that they have likely been subject to persecution in their home country, and because they are not entitled to work here.”
There’s more to the proceedings, but we’ve laid out enough of the details to call time on what can legitimately be described as a circus.
Every key player in the case before the Supreme Court is taxpayer funded: IHREC, on the one hand, and the Minister For Children, Equality, Disability, Integration (which previously dealt with asylum seekers), the State, and Attorney General Rossa Fanning (who are listed as defendants in the case).
For your information, as per IHREC’s most recent annual report, the 2024 gross estimate provision including a supplementary, for Vote 25 Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission was €9,093k of which €5,673k was allocated for pay-related expenditure, and €3,420k of which was allocated to non-pay expenditure.
That’s a lot of money, but I’m uncertain as to whether it’s enough to cover IHREC’s typical expenditures and this court crusade it’s undertaken on the public’s dime. A report late last year indicated that the bill for this particular legal battle is set to surpass €1 million, a figure that could inflate depending on the outcome of the appeal. For example, if it were to be referred to the European Court of Justice for a final decision.
Just as infuriating, however, in this writer’s opinion is the fact that IHREC’s case is based upon a complete misapprehension of Ireland’s asylum situation.
As I’ve noted previously, asylum seekers do have rights under the Reception Conditions Directive and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Those rights include having their basic needs – like shelter, food, access to hygiene facilities – provided for.
The asylum system is fundamentally broken, though, when the bar is set as low as possible for international protection applicants and as high as possible for European member states like Ireland – an imbalance perpetuated by State agencies like IHREC.
The current Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, is on the record as noting that a huge majority of so-called asylum seekers to Ireland are in fact economic migrants, and as such are not eligible for asylum. The Taoiseach said late last year that up to 80 percent of IPAS applicants in Ireland are actually economic migrants who are not genuine asylum seekers.
There’s also the fact then that the vast majority of asylum seekers in recent years have come to Ireland from another safe country (the UK).
Regardless of those improprieties and abuses of the asylum system, IHREC has committed itself to putting those who simply claim asylum on a par with those who are ultimately eligible for asylum. Ideally, in the circumstances envisioned by the architects of Europe’s asylum system, those categories would be one and the same. But they evidently are not.
Cases like this, and like February’s which saw the High Court rule that damages be awarded to a pair of homeless asylum seekers, simply incentivise claiming asylum, whether a person is ultimately eligible or not. The main losers are genuine asylum seekers who have to put up with an overcrowded process, then.
And of course, the Irish taxpayer, who it could reasonably be said is getting some bang for their buck. But the kind of bang that accompanies a demolition job.