Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

My objective is to have recommendations made as soon as possible on international protection applications. This ensures people who are found to be in need of protection can receive it quickly and can begin to rebuild their lives here with a sense of safety and security.

I assure the Deputy that my Department continues to innovate to improve our processes and to reduce processing times, in line with the recommendations made by the Catherine Day expert advisory group, and the commitments in the Government's White Paper published by my colleague, the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman. However, the substantially high number of applications currently being received will, no doubt, present a significant challenge in achieving this. To the end of June this year, the international protection office of my Department has received 6,498 applications. This is a 191% increase on the same period in 2019, the last year in which application numbers were not impacted by Covid-19.

The restrictions on international travel for much of the past two years will naturally have created a higher demand for protection now that travel opportunities have resumed. Similar increases in application numbers are being experienced across a number of our fellow EU member states. The war in Ukraine is also having an impact. Some member states are currently hosting hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people displaced from Ukraine, leaving them with reduced capacity to support asylum seekers from other countries. Ireland is no different in that regard.

My Department is taking all possible steps to ensure we can process applications as quickly as possible. An end-to-end review of relevant international protection processes by a number of multidisciplinary teams from my Department has been completed and published. New measures and procedures will continue to be put in place to improve efficiencies across all aspects of the protection process. Since the introduction of the new efficiency measures, in the first five months of this year we have been able to increase the number of first instance recommendations and permission to remain decisions being made by the international protection office, IPO, by almost 50% when compared with the same period pre-Covid in 2019.

We will continue to look further at how we can increase the processing capacity of the IPO to match the very significant number of international protection applications being received, including through the recruitment of an external panel of barristers, solicitors and legal graduates, which is under way. Given the significant increase in applications, it is creating a significant challenge, even with those improvements and that increased timeframe.

See this speech in context