The fact that a large majority of people seeking asylum in the Irish Republic over the past number of years have produced “false or no documentation” has finally been accepted as being true (as opposed to being “right wing disinformation”) by both the state, and by the mainstream media.
That has not prevented those with a stake in the asylum and migrancy sector from whinging about it. (This sector is worth hundreds of millions in state funding taken from the tax payer, including legal fees funded in great part by the tax-paying citizens through free legal aid and other fees that find their way from your pocket to the privileged class for whom migrancy and asylum is as good an earner as once were the state stipends handed out to administration lackies in the 18th century.)
Somehow, this sector sees the expression of any expectation that people who rock up to Dublin airport should have something like a passport or any other form of identification as being tantamount to human rights abuse. My advice on that is to try that line in JFK the next time you arrive in New York. They might even allow you to pick your own orange jump suit and spend a few days in the company of the residents of Rikker’s Island before sending you home with a running kick up the backside.
The fact that the decision to instruct the Gardaí to implement such checks was news also begs the question as to why they have not being doing so all along. In fact, they were carrying out these checks at one stage, just as every other police force on the planet does routinely, until they were told not to for some reason.
Rural Independent TD for Laois/Offaly Carol Nolan posed that very question, to wit:
This, you would imagine, is a straightforward enough request. Ah no, because in his response the Minister for Justice Simon Harris said that this is a secret.
Why? Well, because of “security reasons” that are in place to “protect the integrity of the immigration system,” he couldn’t comment on “operational procedures of the Border Management Unit or the Garda National Immigration Bureau,” he said.
No sniggering down the back. The “integrity of the immigration system….” Sweet Divine. Maybe they just can’t remember when they stopped?
Anyway, at least we now know that the Border Management Unit and the Garda National Immigration Bureau are now “actively engaging with airport authorities and airlines at a senior level to underscore the importance of passengers possessing correct documentation and to provide support in helping them to reduce the number of passengers boarding flights without the correct documentation.”
One can only trust that they are not deflected from this by the whinging of the people who benefit from the ongoing influx of illegal immigrants who naturally wish to have no controls on the stream of new clients.
Deputy Nolan also asked the Minister to say what the average processing time has been for applications for asylum, dating back to 2016. The Minister chose not to supply the average processing time, but instead to provide the median processing time.
Now, as even those of you whose mastery of statistics does not extend beyond the sectional times at Shelbourne Park dog track will know, the median is the middle number in a series of numbers. Thus, there will be as many larger numbers above the median as below the median. I trust that I am not doing any Department statistician a disfavour by suggesting that in this instance the average processing time is most likely greater than the median processing time?
That aside, even the median processing time had doubled from 9 months in 2017 to 18 months in 2022, although 2022 seems to have been a year of unusual efficiency in comparison to 2021 when the median processing time for an application for asylum was almost two years.
What that, of course, means is that once you get here at all that you are guaranteed a long time at the taxpayers’ expense before your case is even heard.
After that you then have options for appeals, reviews, and failing all else they might just get fed up of you and decide that even though you lied initially about the reasons you came here from London – someone stared at your Arsenal jersey when you got the tube up west and you felt threatened or whatever – that you can stay anyway because they like the cut of your jib and that you might turn out to be a regular TV panellist. Failing that, there is always the amnesty.
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