Jordan is expected to replace Nigeria as the country with the highest number of applicants for asylum in the State when the official figures for the first seven months this year are published.
In April, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee announced that asylum seekers from the country with the highest number of applications in the previous three months would be subject to an accelerated process similar to that applied to those who come from countries of origin which are deemed to be safe. Applications from safe countries are currently receiving decisions in less than three months.
At the time Nigeria, which is not deemed a safe country of origin, had the highest number of applicants. In the first three months of the year, more than 2,000 applications had been made by people from Nigeria, which was a third of the total.
Since the new rules were introduced the number of Nigerians applying has fallen substantially. While there was an average of 650 per month until the end of March, there were slightly over 400 made in April, 400 in May, and only 156 during the month of June.
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By contrast, there has been a significant increase of applications from Jordan with an average 400 applications being made each month in recent times. Jordan is now second highest on the list of country of origin after Nigeria, with 10 per cent of all applications now coming from the Middle Eastern nation.
The rise in the number of Jordanian citizens arriving in Ireland is reflected by data relating to Operation Sonnet, the Garda operation which targets people without the appropriate permissions trying to enter the State through the border with Northern Ireland.
In a letter to the Policing Authority in June, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said 23 per cent of those detected illegally in the State by Sonnet were from Jordan, with Nigeria the next highest at 12 per cent.
The new rule applying to citizens of countries not deemed to be safe was introduced in April at a time when there was a substantial spike in the number of asylum applications being made by Nigerian citizens.
The existing list of safe countries includes Albania, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and South Africa. Both Nigeria and Pakistan were assessed last year, but neither was deemed as a safe country.
Separately, Ms McEntee has confirmed that slightly over 800 Nigerian citizens have left the State over the past 13 years after being refused permission to remain.
About half of those were the subject of enforced deportations, Ms McEntee said in reply to a parliamentary question last month to Independent TD Carol Nolan.
Ms McEntee said she was not in a position to quantify the costs of the deportations, but acknowledged they could be considerable because officers from the Garda National Immigration Bureau are required to provide security escorts for such removals.
She confirmed there were four enforced deportations to Nigeria since January 2023 and the average total cost of each of these operations amounted to €21,912 per case. All of them were carried out using scheduled flights.
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