Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent)
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139. To ask the Minister for Justice and Equality the number of asylum seekers who requested permission to leave the State temporarily under section 9(4)(a) of the Refugee Act 1996 since 2011, in tabular form; the gender of these persons; the country that these persons travelled to; and the reasons permission to leave the State temporarily was granted or refused. [40084/16]

Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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As a general rule applicants seeking international protection are not permitted to leave the State without the consent of the Minister.

On rare occasions such permission has been sought and I am advised by the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS) of my Department that requests are dealt with on an individual and exceptional basis and that statistics for such requests are not captured automatically. It would not be possible to collate the information requested by the Deputy without diverting very significant resources away from processing applications which remains the priority.