The small number of people who are actually deported from the state having been issued with an order to leave has been re-confirmed by a reply to a Freedom of Information request sent to the Department of Justice by a reader of Gript.
The reader had asked the Department to state “the number of deportation orders issued in the last 12 months,” and the actual number of deportations “carried out by the state in the last 12 months.”
In its response the Department said that in the 12 month period between the beginning of July, 2022, and the end of June 2023 that a total of 867 deportation orders had been issued but that just 42 had been enforced by the Gardaí and that a further 55 people had left voluntarily. Which means that just over 11% of people who were issued with a deportation order left the jurisdiction during the period.
The 11% is almost exactly the same as the overall percentage of deportation orders that were affirmed between the period between 2018 and May of 2023. As we reported previously, a PQ response to Rural Independent TD for Laois/Offaly, Carol Nolan, showed that just 282 (11.5%) of the 2,442 orders issued were carried out.
The total number of deportations carried out in 2022 was 119, according to a response given to a question by Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín in May this year. The current trend is set to continue to be significantly below the record of 298 deportations effected in 2019, although that still only accounted for 13% of the orders issued.
As several cases of persons who were issued with deportation orders but subsequently discovered wandering the highways and bye-ways have illustrated, there is little intelligence, it seems, as to what happens to most of the people who are supposedly not supposed to be here at all.
Minister for Justice Helen McEntee informed Carol Nolan in February 2022 that a total of 12,236 persons had been issued with deportation orders since the start of 2011. Given that we know that close to 90% of the orders are never affirmed or carried out, we can only wonder where over 10,000 people supposedly deported might be.
A recent Freedom of Information request from Ken Foxe of The Story has revealed another aspect of the deportation scenario. While the general perception is that most people who are ordered to leave the state are citizens of countries from outside of the EU who may have been unfortunate enough to have been among the very few asylum seekers whose claims were discovered to be bogus and then ordered to go home, the reply to Foxe shows the extent to which many are EU citizens “removed from the state.”
The Freedom of Information request submitted by Foxe had also asked for a “categorisation of how many of these removals related to a serious criminal conviction, and the category of offence that it related to eg. homicide, sexual assault, armed robbery, assault, etc.”
The reply indicates that all of those with one exception who were removed were deported following their conviction, and presumably having previously served a prison sentence, for a variety of offences.
Drug offences appear to be the most common, although as the table for 2021 indicates the removals related to a wide range of offences.
In the light of our recent report on the activities of the Black Axe criminal gang in the state, money laundering and membership of a criminal organisation have been among the convictions which have led to subsequent removal from the state.