The Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, has acknowledged that there has been an “astronomical increase” in the number of people coming to the country claiming asylum, even as the High Court ruled that the State’s failure to provide accommodation to newly arrived asylum seekers is a breach of their human rights.
Her comments came in the same week that a poll carried out for Red C by the Electoral Commission revealed that 72% of Irish people believe there should be “very strict limits on the number of immigrants coming to live in Ireland” – while more than a fifth of voters believe politicians support increased immigration to bring in “obedient voters” who will support them in future elections.
Increased pressure on accommodation services has meant that there are currently 2,352 asylum applicants awaiting an accommodation offer, the Department of Integration, with children, families and women being prioritised, along with vulnerable men.
Despite polls repeatedly finding that Ireland “has taken in too many refugees” or that Ireland needs a ‘Rwanda-style’ policy to deter migration, the numbers arriving continue to reflect an unprecedented rise in applications for asylum.
Figures from the International Protection Office show that the State is now providing some 31,220 persons with asylum accommodation, separate from Ukrainians who are housed as persons in receipt of Temporary Protection. That is quadruple the number in asylum accommodation since the end of 2021, some two and a half years ago.
In the week ending 21st of July a total of 285 additional arrivals were recorded, IPAS statistics show, averaging 41 persons per day, with 41% of those arriving being single males, while 23% were children.
Figures from the International Protection Office show that in the first six months of 2024, 10,057 asylum seekers arrived here seeking protection – a 112% increase (or more than double) on the same period last year. By June 2023, some 4,734 asylum seekers were registered by IPAS for the first six months of the year.
Over 20,000 persons claiming asylum expected to arrive here in 2024 alone if the trend for the year to date continues.
As reported by Ben Scallan last week, Ireland received the largest per capita number of asylum seekers of any other EU country in the month of May – even more than Mediterranean states like Greece, Spain and Cyprus.
According to the latest data released by the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA), Ireland received a total of 2,010 asylum seekers in May despite having a population of 5.2 million. This represents 1 asylum seeker for every 2,600 inhabitants, or 381 asylum seekers per million – dramatically more than the EU+ average of 184 per million. (EU+ refers to all 27 EU member states, plus Norway and Switzerland).
The profile of those arriving has now shifted with, the number of asylum seekers arriving in Ireland from Jordan surging by more than 1800 per cent in the last 12 months. Where just 53 Jordanian asylum seekers arrived in July 2023, in Ireland. This number has now jumped to 1,021, the figures released last week show. However, Jordan currently hosts around 2.3m Palestinian refugees and it is thought that the major increase in those arriving in Ireland is related to the number of Palestinian refugees in that country.
Minister McEntee made her comments to Newstalk’s The Hard Shoulder yesterday, when she said that “obviously a huge amount of effort has and is being made over the last number of years to house tens of thousands of people – and in particular post-COVID.”
“We’ve seen an astronomical increase in people coming to the country and seeking International Protection,” she said, adding that it was her belief that this would continue “in the years ahead” and that: “we need to have State-provided accommodation, we need to have larger accommodation centres,” she said.