Ms Oonagh Buckley:

There are a couple of issues. Permission to remain or the grant of refugee status does not actually give one citizenship. There is a further requirement of residency that takes a number of years. I assume the Deputy is talking about permission to remain in the broader sense.

As I mentioned earlier, we have nearly 1,000 people with permission to remain who remain in our centres. We would like them very much to be accommodated in the wider community because that would free up a lot of space in our centres for the people for whom we have to provide accommodation.

We have certainly been asked by the Minister and the Government to examine the case of undocumented workers and to look at people in the wider community who may not have a current status. We have not been asked to fasttrack things. We have not needed to be asked because we are constantly working on trying to improve the speed with which we take decisions on whether people are granted permission to remain or not.

We have not been asked to change the criteria on the basis of which we make those decisions.