Mr. Colm O'Dwyer:

Ms Gibney mentioned delays. I have some of the recent figures that have been quoted. The commission and any lawyers involved in the area would think that one of the most significant obstacles to what we welcome in the White Paper actually being realised is the delays in the international protection system as it stands. Ms Gibney mentioned that approximately 5,000 people - maybe more now - are awaiting their first-instance decision from the International Protection Office. The Irish Refugee Council has advised that the median time to get a first-instance decision is now 26.9 months. Effectively, it takes more than two years for people to get just their first-instance decision - and that is just the median. If we all remember our leaving certificate maths, that means that some people are waiting considerably longer.

We do not really hear so much about the delay in the appeals tribunal. The Irish Refugee Council has advised that at the moment the processing time for an appeal is approximately ten months. It has increased from nine months. Earlier in the summer there was a backlog of 1,655 appeals.

Compared with the IPO, that may not seem like a huge number, but one of the problems on a practical level is that, as some members may be aware, the protection tribunal has a premises beside Pearse Street and there are physical constraints. There are only, I think, five courtrooms, if you want to call them that, or conference rooms where the hearings can take place and there are restrictions on the number of sittings that can take place in a day. Even the maximum is probably about eight on any given day. That would be four in the morning and maybe four in the afternoon. The premises has five rooms. How a backlog of 1,700 plus all the cases that will probably come through from the IPO now as it ramps up will be dealt with is really a challenge.

We have been focusing on the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, but, to be fair, and as the committee may be aware, these are actually challenges for the Department of Justice as opposed to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth because the former in effect has control over those systems. Those delays really have to be dealt with before most of the White Paper can be implemented. Mr. Kirwan mentioned the idea of granting people leave to remain if they have been two years in the system. The committee will probably be aware that Catherine Day had recommended that that be done at the end of this year but, obviously, if there are now thousands of people in those backlogs, many of them will be at the two-year stage at the end of this year, so we would be talking about granting leave to remain to many thousands of people. The White Paper is not as explicit on that and seems to talk about doing that in 2022, in the hope, I suppose, that the backlogs will have gone down by then. We are not seeing action on these backlogs at present, and I do not think Covid is really the explanation. In fact, the backlogs are only getting worse, partially due to Covid. It is clear that these backlogs were already there when the White Paper was being developed. Maybe they were not quite as bad, but certainly, before Covid, neither the IPO nor the IPAT was anywhere near the target of six months as the median time it would take to get a decision. The White Paper to a certain extent is built on that being the timescale and, clearly, it will be a real struggle to get it down to that level. The alternative is to grant all the people in the backlog at least the option of leave to remain but, really, those are areas within the ambit of the Department of Justice rather than the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, so perhaps the committee's queries about those things might be better aimed towards the Minister for Justice rather than the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.