Mr. Luke Bukha:

It is not as straightforward as that. People come for all sorts of reasons. Refugees are manageable because the United Nations deals with them from country to country. The people we normally talk about are asylum seekers, those who come by themselves without any official outside agency helping them. In many cases, that is why the situation is so difficult if there is no clear policy or procedure to deal with this.

When Ireland accepts refugees under agreement with the United Nations or other bodies, the process can take two or three years, but asylum seekers come by themselves. Not all of them are coming from the African continent. Some come from countries such as America or even from Australia. It is not always running away from the government, some are running away from other groups of people. We realised after people died that there was no record of the number of deaths. We realise the importance of having a record of the number of deaths.

As the member suggested, we will try to document what we know. That is something we never considered. We are all just volunteers and have just done this on our own volition. We are not funded by local government but we are taking note of the numbers who die.