Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Department has made significant investment in staff, technology and re-engineering processes at the IPO and that investment is delivering. Over the course of the past year, we tripled the number of monthly decisions for processing times for applicants from safe countries, reduced under ten weeks, with numbers arriving from them dropping considerably, too.

To my own knowledge, when people exhaust the international protection process, they will eventually get to a stage where they have no entitlement to any State supports. Very often, they will leave in that case. They will have no access to housing, social welfare, employment or anything like that. When they get what is called a “section 3 letter”, which is a notification of intention to deport, they very often will know that the writing is on the wall, and they will then leave at that stage. I know that from my own professional experience and background as well. It is only ever a small proportion of those who exhaust the system and end up getting deportation orders, which are very expensive. In terms of the rates of deportation orders, that is an average of what we have had in recent years. I understand it is on the rise.