Ms Oonagh Buckley:

It is not up and running yet. I will explain why. We are issuing positive decisions that give permission to remain or refugee status. Negative decisions however, trigger an automatic process under the 2015 Act. A letter must issue inviting a person to declare whether he or she will remove himself or herself from the State within five days. There was a recommendation by Catherine Day that the process would be moved out to 30 days and take account of children being in school and issues such as school terms. That work is in hand in the Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, which is currently before the Joint Committee on Justice for pre-legislative scrutiny. The other thing that is automatically triggered is that a person with a negative decision would be served with a deportation order if he or she does not remove himself or herself from the State within five days. Given the restrictions on international travel that were such a feature, in particular at the beginning of this year, the Minister took a decision that the issuance of deportation orders would cease, save in certain very limited circumstances where, for example, there was a case of significant criminality. As a consequence, we have not resumed the issuance of negative letters yet because of those trigger points. People need to be able to consult with their lawyers and do other such things and that became so difficult during the pandemic that it was not fair on people to get such letters. We have some hundreds of those decisions made but we have not started to issue them yet.