Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Anti-Austerity Alliance)
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67. To ask the Minister for Justice and Equality if her attention has been drawn to any family members of Irish citizens who are refugees from the Syria-Iraq conflict; if she takes into account the particular difficulties of acquiring in-date travel documents for these refugees when seeking visas to Ireland to be reunited with their family members resident here; if she will consider issuing travel documents to such persons; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [27424/16]

Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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I am advised by the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS) of my Department that a person must be in possession of either a valid travel document or national passport in order to make a visa application. Should a person not meet this criterion, they will need to either obtain a national passport from their home country or a travel document from a humanitarian organisation such as the International Committee of the Red Cross or similar.

Ireland has placed particular focus on implementation of its Resettlement Programme which will see a total of 520 programme refugees resettled in Ireland under the UNHCR-led programme by December 2017. To date, some 486 of these 520 have been admitted from Lebanon. Sufficient cases were selected during a selection mission to Lebanon earlier this year to fill the rest of the quota of 520. These cases have been security screened and health screened and are scheduled to arrive between now and the end of October. As we will have fulfilled our commitments under the EU Resettlement programme ahead of target, the Government and I recently announced that we are extending the resettlement programme to take in a further 260 refugees from Lebanon in 2017.