Mr. David Costello:

A team has being established, comprising various EU agencies, for example, the European Asylum Support Office, Frontex and Europol, officials from the Italian and Greek authorities and individual liaison officers from each member state. The team is meeting this week to put a process in place to examine applicants from Syria, Iraq and Eritrea who have applied for asylum in Italy and Greece and to select groups from them to go to each of the States. The selections will be in line with the numbers that have been allocated to each state, for example, Ireland will take 600 in the first decision and approximately 1,800 in the second decision. The files will be given to individual states to confirm that they are happy with the caseload. They will have very limited choice. The Italians and Greeks, supported by the EU agencies, will make the choice. While we can decide for security reasons that we do not want a person, it will be a limited input.

When the cases are agreed, people will come on a three-monthly basis. We have to inform the Commission of how many we can take on a three-monthly basis. The travel will be effected on the ground by the Italian and Greek authorities and then the people will arrive here. We will be expecting them and they will enter the emergency centres for accommodation and any other supports they need, such as health assessments. Around the same time, I will begin to schedule people for interviews. I expect, given that they will be coming on a group basis rather than all the 2,400 together, that I will be able to do it on an incremental basis over a period of, say, two or three months. Given that they are coming from areas of serious conflict, the expectation is that they will be granted refugee status. Then, the next group will arrive. I do not anticipate major delays in my office, unless we run into particularly challenging cases.