Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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Question 172: To ask the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform if he will consider redeploying persons processing asylum claims to the section dealing with citizenship, in view of the decline in numbers of asylum applications. [2253/05]

Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)
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As I have indicated previously, the major reduction in the numbers of asylum applicants is now giving me an opportunity to re-focus resources on areas of service provision for non-nationals which are under-resourced at this point in time. The citizenship area is one of the areas which is benefiting from that process.

Given the very large numbers of staff involved and having regard to the reduction in the number of asylum applications being received in the State, I have engaged the services of PA Consulting Group in order, inter alia, to ensure that the staffing resources currently available within the asylum, immigration and citizenship areas of my Department are optimized and targeted in the most effective manner possible at core functional activities — one of which, in the immigration and citizenship areas, is an improvement in customer service. In fact, some re-deployment of staff from the asylum to the immigration and citizenship areas has already taken place.

Given the scale of rapid and unprecedented growth in the immigration area of course it is not simply a matter of staffing — information technology will play an important part in the implementation of a long term sustainable solution. In this regard, preparatory work is being undertaken on a request for tender document which will lead in due course to a major enhancement of the information technology capacity of the immigration and citizenship areas of my Department.