A response to a Freedom of Information request from a reader of Gript provides further evidence of the small number of deportations that are carried out by the Irish authorities in comparison to the number of orders for deportation that are issued.
The latest figures show that between the beginning of 2022 and May 3 this year that just 112 “escorted deportations” had been carried out by the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB).
The total cost of the operations amounted to €1,157,902.04.
The average cost of GNIB escorted deportations over the period concerned was €10,338.41. The largest cost incurred by any one single deportation so far in 2024 has been €27,890.21.
A note attached to the FOI response explains the basis for the costs. “In some cases a person may resist deportation and the GNIB will conduct a risk assessment to determine how many escorts are required.
In addition, in cases where persons are convicted of offences are being removed a higher number of escorts are typically required.”
Of perhaps more interest is the large gap between the number of deportation orders that are issued and the number of those which are actually carried out. For as Parliamentary Questions and another Freedom of Information request from the same reader that was responded to on November 7 2023 showed, of 1,061 deportation orders issued between the beginning of 2021 and the end of September 2023, a mere 61 or less than 6% had actually been enforced.
A PQ response to Carol Nolan showed that between the beginning of 2018 and May 2023 that just 11% of the deportation orders that had been issued were upheld when appealed.
The reason for that, as the other FOI revealed, was the high number of deportation orders that were revoked over the period covering 2021 and 2023. The total number of orders that were revoked amounted to 1,861 between the beginning of 2019 and November 30, 2023.
Averaging out those numbers above, it appears that as many deportation orders might be revoked as issued each year.
Although, if one was more interested in financial prudence and account book savings had all of those deportations been carried out by the GNIB at the average cost, then the bill would have come to €19,239,018. On the other hand, one would have to calculate the other costs of allowing persons to stay here who the State had for whatever reason concluded it might be better to remove, but did not remove. They may or may not still be here, as we shall see.
Gript has previously highlighted the Twilight World of what happens when people eventually – often after many years of appeals and reviews – exhaust their options and are refused an application for asylum or leave to remain. These persons are then no longer entitled to being provided for through IPAS and presumably in a significant number of cases are persons who are then subject, or at least ought to be subject, to a deportation order.
Such persons would be part of the statistics referenced above to deportation orders either subsequently revoked or in a very small number of instances physically carried out at great further cost to the citizens of the state by the Garda National Immigration Bureau.
What happens to many of such persons was the subject of a Parliamentary Question on Tuesday from Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín who asked the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee for “the number of these who IPAS is now unable to locate or does not know their whereabouts.”
In her response, the Minister once again illustrated the extremely vague manner in which the state addresses that problem. She stated that while “applicants” – and bear in mind that we are referring to persons who are among those whose applications have been rejected – are “not under any obligation to remain in IPAS accommodation,” that they are “obliged to notify the International Protection Office of their current address.”
Furthermore, that “failure to do so is an offence under the International Protection Act 2015 and these applicants can also be dealt with through the non-cooperation procedure.” Dealing with includes deportation, but of course that is almost as rare as a hen’s tooth.
So the poor Minister is not for the first time reduced to regaling us again with the urban myth of the large number of people who “will have left the State voluntarily, but as there are no exit checks at Irish borders, it is not possible to accurately quantify this number.”
There we have it in a nutshell. On the one hand, as recent reports from Gript and others have confirmed, the State is pretty much in the dark about how most of the people who apply for International Protection in Mount Street actually manage to get there at all.
Then, on the other hand when most of them who are eventually rejected and leave the responsibility of the State and may be subject to deportation, the same State is reduced to assumptions about where they might actually go. Flann O’Brien might have written it. “The Third GNIBman.”