Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 23 October 2025
Public Accounts Committee
Appropriation Accounts 2024
Vote 21 - Prisons
Vote 24 - Justice
Vote 40 - Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth - Programme E Expenditure
Report on the Accounts of the Public Services 2022
Chapter 9 - Assessing Cyber Security in the Public Sector
Report on the Accounts of the Public Services 2024
Chapter 9 - Criminal Justice Operational Hubs
Chapter 10 - Management of International Protection Accommodation Contracts
2:00 am
Mr. Doncha O'Sullivan:
We have very accurate figures for the people who leave as part of the voluntary return programme because we do not give them any funding until they have actually gone home and confirmed it. We publish those figures regularly. I think there were about 1,300 so far this year, and we expect the number to grow a lot. What we do not attempt to put a figure on, for the reason we discussed earlier, is the people who have left without telling us where they were going or what they were doing. We check whether they are on our system and whether they are getting a daily expenses allowance. If the Garda comes across them, they can be arrested and removed. That does not happen very often. It comes back to the idea that we do not have exit checks and do not have other types of internal controls that would allow you to set up-----
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