A Gript reader yesterday received an email from the Department of Justice that shows that in the six months between November 2023 and the end of April 2024 that a total of 1,557 arrived at Dublin airport who presented with no documentation. The FOI request was sent in May.
The total for 2023 was 3,285 so if the six month total to April is averaged over the rest of 2024 the total for this year will be similar.
70% of all asylum applications made at Dublin airport in 2023 were by persons who presented with no or inadequate documentation. Those figures were given to RTÉ’s Prime Time researchers in January this year.
A Freedom of Information request by Newstalk, however, was responded to by the Department who said that in 2023 4,007 people had presented at Dublin airport with no or false documentation and that this accounted for 85% of the applications made for asylum at the airport.
The discrepancy is most likely accounted for by the exclusion of persons with false identity in the information supplied to Prime Time. The Gript reader also requested specific information on persons who had presented with “no documents passport etc” so that category is once again most likely not accounted for in the table providing the numbers of “undocumented” arrivals.
In June, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee told reporters in Trim that the numbers of persons who presented with no documentation or false documentation had fallen by one third in 2023. 4,968 people had arrived with no documentation in 2022. The Minister attributed this in large part to the almost €1.5 million in fines that were imposed on airline companies which had failed to identity such passengers who had booked flights with them.
However, the figures supplied to our reader would not provide any evidence that there will be another such significant drop in the overall numbers of people arriving with false documentation or no documentation. That would have to be placed in the context of much increased numbers of people who have arrived in the past six months to claim asylum here.
The other question is of course how many people who apply for asylum here even present at Dublin airport or at one of the other entry points to the state. The Minister herself in April this year claimed that 80% of those who made applications had entered the state by crossing the border with Northern Ireland.
Somewhat bizarrely, Tánaiste Micheál Martin disputed the Minister’s claim even though as I reported the available statistics which Gript had seen backed up McEntee’s claim. A response to a Parliamentary Question in October 2023 showed that in the nine months to the end of September 2023 that of a total of 8,906 applications that had been made for International Protection that 6,821 had been first made at the offices of the International Protection Office at Mount Street, Dublin/
That meant that 77% of those making an application for asylum had not entered or had not declared that they had entered the state through any of the airports, seaports or other designated entry points where applications should be made. The only other plausible explanation is that they were smuggled into the country and were not detected on entry or that they simply travelled across the border from the north.
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