The failure to follow through on the deportation order issued to the suspect in the stabbings at a Dublin school last Thursday, illustrates not only the high success rate of taxpayer-funded legal firms in having such orders overturned or eventually ignored; but also the anomalously high number of Algerians allowed residence in the Irish state in comparison to other EU countries.
In fact, international asylum statistics show that more applications for asylum were made here by Algerians in 2022 than in any other state in the world – and there is simply no valid reason for these numbers. .
According to reports in the Irish Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, the suspect in the violent attack – who was also arrested during the Summer for another stabbing incident – had arrived in the state around 20 years ago, and had successfully appealed a deportation order. He was then allowed leave to remain and subsequently applied for and was granted Irish citizenship. He does not appear to have been employed over the course of his stay here, according to a report in the Sunday Independent.
As of November 19, there were 3,038 Algerian nationals being accommodated by International Protections Accommodation Services (IPAS)
At the time that the suspect was allowed leave to remain, the number of Algerians claiming asylum was almost statistically insignificant. Available figures would suggest that it was below 150 or 2%. It now stands at 11.8%.
There have been no significant internal developments in Algeria that would point to a reason why the numbers of persons seeking asylum might have increased. A comparison of international statistics might point instead to Ireland being, as An Taoiseach suggested in relation to another asylum issue, an example of movements from “secondary countries” for reasons of welfare provision.
EU statistics overall support the perception that the majority of those seeking asylum are male, and predominantly males under the age of 34.
The 2023 report of the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) however, indicates that the profile of those coming here differs considerably from that of the EU overall, with regard to country of origin.
Algeria does not even feature among the top 15 countries of origin in the EU overall. That despite the much closer historical and linguistic connection of France and even Belgium to Algeria and the fact that France already has a large Algerian community.
The global figures on Algerian asylum seekers are even more striking. Of a total of 9,909 applications made by Algerians in the entire world in 2022, 1,766 – 18% – were submitted in Ireland, meaning we had the largest group of Algerian asylum seekers in the world entering the country.
We even had. 500 more than France which is a shortish boat trip across the Med to Marseilles and has a large daily air traffic with Algeria.
There is simply no valid reason why so many people should travel to Ireland from Algeria to claim asylum. None. Nor does the low rate of initial acceptance of such claims – which are close enough to the 8.5% international average – support any subjective belief that there are any grounds to justify this situation.
There is also a very low number of work permits issued to Algerians who can come here legitimately to work.
Just 15 of more than 25,000 work permits so far in 2023 were to Algerians. The corresponding figures were 35 of almost 40,000 permits issued in 2022. This seems to indicate that there is little if any economic or cultural ties between the two countries.
This fact is also illustrated by the 1,028 Algerian citizens who were here at the time of the 2022 Census. The vast majority of these were asylum seekers which grew exponentially during 2022, from just 238 who were in IPAS accommodation at the start of 2022.
The most significant pull factor in all of this, apart from the economic/welfare opportunism that drives it, is the fact that initial rejection does not mean that the application will be returned home. That is where the lengthy and ponderous appeals system comes into play. It was that which appears to have allowed the Dublin suspect to have not only remained in Ireland but to become an Irish citizen.
The number of cases pending decision here, according to the EUAA, more than doubled between 2018 and 2022 to close to 15,000. That was more than the total number of new applications for the year, and given that the number applying for International Protection this year will be similar, it is clearly not a sustainable system.
If large-scale overturning of refusals to remain is to be addressed, the state must do something to lessen the attractiveness of the appeals system for both appellants and the legal teams and advocacy NGOs which encourage all of this, and benefit from it. We shall be examining in more detail just how that process operates.
If one of the apparent moves being considered by the Government in the midst of a growing crisis might be to restrict the numbers of single young men seeking to claim asylum here, that would have a significant impact on the number of people arriving here from Algeria which would perhaps start to resemble close the EU average than the current anomaly.
Loading ...
Real food for thought but unlikely to be read and seriously considered by most politicians.
I would suggest many asylum seekers know that the Irish politicians are either suckers or deliberately want to change Ireland to reflect their ideologies and not the best of traditional Irish culture and values.
I would also suggest that most NGOs are ripping off the Irish public. It would be far better if taxpayers were taxed less and allowed to pick the charities they wish to support rather than being forced to support those the politicians favour. We need real charities not ideological ones.
NGOs are fundamental and the key to this growing problem….
As someone who was involved in the legal end of the asylum process for several years I have some insight into its nooks and crannies.
The first thing that should be said about the asylum and international protection system is that the the cross-bar you have to clear to become an applicant for refuge is not to have suffered persecution or hail from a war-torn country, but to have the means to pay people-smugglers, document forgers, and/or afford international air-tickets so you han turn up at the frontiers of some place like Ireland. The Refugee Conventions are of little use to the real persecuted of this world who languish in squalid camps on the periphery of the world’s conflict and disaster-zones and are unlikely to afford any of these things.
Migrants make logical decisions when they choose a destination in which to make their asylum-application, and it is not particularly an assessment of where there application is likely to be considered most sympathetically. It is far more influenced by an assessment of where they are likely to get to stay and not be deported, irrespective of the likelihood of the success or otherwise of their application for asylum. The success rates of asylum-seekers in getting asylum in Ireland, comparing country for country, is not far from the EU average. For example, Nigerians, Georgians, and South Africans are unlikely to be successful in their asylum applications in Ireland or anywhere in the EU. However, they are far more likely to get to stay here because Ireland hardly ever deports failed asylum-seekers, and because it is correctly perceived that if you can hang in here long enough or ‘embed’ by using various delaying strategies, you are likely to be granted leave to stay or benefit from one of the asylum ‘amnesties’ granted by successive Ministers for Justice to relieve the backlog of unfinalised applications in our overwhelmed and inadequately resourced asylum-assessment system. It doesn’t take a genius to see that these policies make Ireland a particularly attractive destination for asylum-seekers from safe countries, and promote such delaying strategies as document concealment/destruction which makes dealing with the application of the person concerned difficult, expensive, and lengthy, ‘going to ground’ and bogus medical certs when hearings are due, and bringing successive judicial reviews to frustrate finalisation of applications.
Presuming Ireland is to remain compliant with the international rule-or-law and our own constitution, there are limited ways in which we can legally clamp down on this mass asylum-abuse. One thing that can be done and which would make Ireland a far less asylum-destination is to properly resource the asylum-assessment process so it can deliver speedy final decisions. It is difficult to calculate anything but approximate numbers from the published figures, but it appears that fewer than one final decision is delivered for every four new asylum seekers coming into the system. Everyone knows that the resulting backlog is sure to force the government to another general amnesty (or loads of individual ‘leaves to remain’ orders)
Getting tough with document concealment/destruction is sorely needed. After the much publicised intention by the Minister to deter this strategy, nothing was done, and the practice is on the increase again. Asylum-seekers have an obligation to co-operate with the assessment-system and we would be well within our rights to deem the failure to produce the documents you must have possessed to board your flight here as grounds for refusal of leave to apply for asylum. In no case should undocumented arrivals be given PPS numbers, or leave to work, or permanent accommodation pending determination of their claims. Alas, this is not currently the case.
Finally, the ‘gatekeeper’ procedure for taking a case in the High Court for Judicial Review just doesn’t work where the primary purpose of the application is delay, and the applicant is a ‘man of straw’ and there are no costs consequences, irrespective of the outcome of the case. Immigration lawyers are perfectly capable of drafting grounding affidavits which will get an application past the ‘leave’ stage regardless of the fact the may be less than truthful. Untruth only has consequences where the case actually and eventually goes to trial, and a costs order can be executed against the applicant. The applicant will be hoping that med certs and other strategies will gain a series of adjournments while he or she ‘embeds’ and gets leave to remain, at which point the case will be discontinued (after the solicitor gets cost under the Attorney General’s Scheme). Dealing with the abuse of the JR system within the constitution will not be easy. Providing far more judges to hear immigration cases, and far less tolerence of adjournment applications would certainly speed up the process and lessen the use of the process to cause dlay in finalisation of asylum claims.
“[…] because Ireland hardly ever deports failed asylum-seekers, and because it is correctly perceived that if you can hang in here long enough or ‘embed’ by using various delaying strategies, you are likely to be granted leave to stay or benefit from one of the asylum ‘amnesties’ granted by successive Ministers for Justice to relieve the backlog of unfinalised applications in our overwhelmed and inadequately resourced asylum-assessment system.”
Isn’t this deliberate policy, though ?
This began, really, in ’96/’97, when there was trickle of a few hundred ‘asylum-seekers’ from Nigeria, which later turned into such a flood that by the year before the Citizenship referendum, 85% of all births in the Republic were to Nigerian mothers who had timed their flights to Ireland to within a few months of their due-date.
But if you looked at the County Development plans prepared in the years prior to this, all of the flats built in Tallaght and Blanchardstown and the other spots to which the Nigerians were moved were already proposed, there had been no need for such an enormous scale of housing as then occurred as the Irish population was stable and there was no prospective growth on the horizon that would have necessitated these plans. The asylum-seekers were processed, in a very assembly-line manner, from short stays in hotels to the new falts and put on housing benefit. Flabbergasted staff in SDCC would talk about it.
There were – apart from a couple of high-profile cases where the applicants took the piss with appeal after appeal – no deportations, despite in excess of 90% of the applications being refused.
The government introduced massive tax breaks to incentivise a new generation of landlords on a scale of private rental never seen before.
If they had stopped this, and deported the false claimants, they would have been left with an enormous, un-needed and unnecessary housing stock.
Additionally, the FF government at the time were partnering with private groups, either as hosts co-hosts for meetings for mooted schemes such as ‘The Linear City’ for Ireland, which was a proposed plan to build an almost continuous, high density city down Ireland’s esat coast, skirting around the mountains, and down to wexford which was to gobble up Dublin and be capable of hosting a population of 10 million.
At this time, we had the new EU accession states, so the citizenship referendum didn’t really reduce the scale and pace of the building.
we had gone from 900,000 homes nationally to 1.9 million in ten or twelve years – the official cso population figures seemed a bit dodgy at this stage, the only way they could be accounted for was if only one person was living in every new house or apartment. There were rumblings, the official line was that the population had grown by 7% through immigration (from less than one peecent at the start of the 90s) and Bertie said he would be “uneasy”, I think, if it grew beyond 10%. All the same, the offficial line was that there was no such thing as ‘mass-immigration’ and anybody who said there was was scaremongering (not even the most lefty at the time publicy supported large scale immigration, in fact, the more academicially-inclined leftist voices, while being pro-diversity often described mass immigration as a capitalist/neoliberal economic control on existing populations)
The polish government at the time stated that one million poles had gone to the UK, and half a million had gone to Ireland (the Irish govt. had given a ‘guesstimate’ of 200k.
The rate of housing construction was, though rapid, kept just barely short of demand, so that prices were constantly on the rise. While the IFSC was hurtling along, almost all the eu migrants worked in the lower paid service industries or in construction. The constant joke wa that thempoles were building flats to host the poles, but it really was a kind of pyramid scheme.
So much so, that when the financial crash happened, we had, in the space of a few months gone from a finely tuned supply/demand building rate for the new migrants that never once slipped into oversupply (which would have lowered the skyrocketing prices) to, in 2008, almost 350,000 empty umwanted amd unneeded housing units across the country im variousmstates of completion.
They had been guaranteed investments but were immediately unsellable – the immigration rate had plummetted, many ledt. The builders literally abandoned them before the rooves were on.
This wasn’t just the weird ghost estates dropped on empry farmland – the beginnings of those plush apartments at the old Barracks in Islandbridge was abandoned for so long that ivy crept up and grew over the ten-foot high artist’s impressions of the build, completely hiding them.
Long way to saying that there is a reason there is a disfunctional asylum system – it is deliberate. The government have a massive population growth policy, much higher proportiinally than anywhere else in the western world.
The Ireland 2040 thing had a mooted 10 million living her, I think.
And back in Enda’s days as the country was trying to exit the recession, he made a bizarre remark, in the comtext of meeting he & Nolan had been having with international investors, about having to make some “very hard decisions about Ireland’s size.
On the asylum system, internationally speaking, itself, it is an absurdity. What are these international rules of law ? There is no court binding a nation to them in the same way as, say, war-crimes. If voluntary, they can be revisited.
Whatever noble intentions may have been behind them initially, they are now predominantly no more than the tool of international financiers, investments made on the basis of future population growth.
This is why the so-called ‘housing-crisis’ is a misnomer – this is the same ponzi scheme in an adjusted form.
Would it be the European court of human rights that, at least in part, makes it very difficult to deport illegal immigrants?
I don’t know of any Irish case brought to them. I think the ’embedding’ that Peter describes at the end has always sufficed.
And there has never been any real intention to deport, as they were adopted into the population growth strategies.
Thank you for adding to Peters excellent piece with your own excellent overview Thomas.
You both went to a lot of trouble and it is appreciated.
WE SHOULD REFUSE TO ACCEOT ASYLUM CLAIMS IN IRELAND, END OF. WE CAN ACCEPT 100 OR SO PROGRAMME REFUGEES OR IDPS EACH YEAR FROM THE CAMPS
Is it any wonder that people are loosing faith in the asylum process. Politicians need to sort this out for everyone concerned, especially for those actually fleeing war and persecution. Also, I thought people in refugee camps were to be given priority in the asylum process?
Thank you for going to so much trouble with this Peter. Very interesting and informative.
An aside: Algeria has 99% Sunni population. Those promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in Ireland love to go on holiday to warm places like Algeria and Morocco. They are not troubled by the carbon footprint of their flights nor the fact that there is zero DEI in these countries and their atrocious treatment of tiny non Muslim minorities. It is time to cut off all state support to the NGOs that promote the DEI ideology and are helping support those entering Ireland with cultures and values inimical with those in Ireland.
I don’t get how anybody from Algeria can claim Asylum status anywhere because there’s no war in Algeria
Diversity is our stench!