Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 26 July 2022
1550. Deputy Charles Flanagan asked the Minister for Justice the number persons from Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia who have arrived in Ireland over each of the past six months who have sought international protection. [40205/22]
View answerFor those who are in the international protection process, our objective is to have decisions made on their applications, including the permission to remain consideration, as soon as possible. This ensures that those who are found to be in need of our protection can receive it quickly and begin rebuilding their lives here with a sense of safety and security.
The table below provides the number of applications for international protection made between January and June 2022 from persons who stated Georgia, Armenia and Azerbijan as their country of nationality, broken down by month.
|
Nationality |
January |
February |
March |
April |
May |
June |
|
Georgia |
49 |
57 |
113 |
198 |
340 |
424 |
|
Azerbaijan |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
5 |
|
Armenia |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
5 |
0 |
Where the number of applications for individual countries is low (less than 6), a further breakdown is not provided. This is for reasons of confidentiality, as provided for under Section 26 of the International Protection Act 2015.
I can assure the Deputy that my Department continues to work to improve the international protection process and to reduce processing times, in line with the recommendations made by the Expert Advisory Group, led by Dr. Catherine Day, and the commitments in the Government's White Paper, published by my colleague, Minister Roderic O’Gorman. However, the substantially higher number of applications currently being received will present a significant challenge in achieving this.
My Department is taking all possible steps to ensure we can process applications as quickly as possible. An end-to-end review of relevant international protection processes by a multi-disciplinary team from my Department has been completed and published. New measures and procedures will continue to be put in place to improve efficiencies across all aspects of the protection process.
Since the introduction of new efficiency measures, in the first six months of this year we have been able to increase the number of first instance recommendations and permission to remain decisions being made by the IPO by 56% when compared with the same period pre-Covid in 2019.
We will continue to look further at how we increase the processing capacity of the IPO to match the very significant number of international protection applications being received, including through the recruitment of an external panel of barristers, solicitors and legal graduates, which is under way.
My Department will, by October 2022 at the latest, commence a review of progress made in reducing and improving processing times.
