About 10 per cent of people arriving to live in Ireland in the year to April 2024 were seeking international protection according to new research from the European Migration Network published on Tuesday.
In a report which draws on a wide range of existing data compiled by Government and other sources, the organisation’s latest annual report, published in collaboration with the Economic and Social Research Institute, finds that of 149,200 people who moved to Ireland from abroad during that 12-month period, up to 17,000 were seeking international protection. This number includes a proportion who would subsequently have moved on to another country.
The 149,200 total represented an increase of 5 per cent on the previous year and was the third straight year in which more than 100,000 arrived to live in Ireland from overseas.
Of these, however, about 20 per cent were Irish citizens returning from a spell living abroad, while 18 per cent would have been citizens of another EU state and 4 per cent were from the UK.
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Of the remaining 86,000 people, about 19,000 are estimated by the report’s authors to have been arriving from Ukraine to seek Temporary Protection and up to 17,000 would have International Protection applicants.
“Providing a precise figure is complicated because population migration estimates are April to April while the other data tends to be January to December,” said Keire Murphy, one of the report’s authors.
“But the estimate is that of that 150,000 up to 17,000 would have been seeking International Protection and that’s the absolute maximum; it would require that every single one of those remained in the country for more than a year, which is the definition of immigration,” Ms Murphy said.
Emigration during the period is put at 69,900, of whom about half were Irish citizens and a third are said to have previously come to Ireland from what is categorised as the “rest of the world”. Many of these, however, would have been holders of permits allowing them to study, work or join family members in Ireland.
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The number of valid permits increased by 24 per cent during the year, with 30 per cent issued for the purposes of employment, 21 per cent for education and 19 per cent for family reunification.
The number of International Protection applications in 2023, at 13,277, was down by 3 per cent but remained significantly above previous years. There was a 90 per cent increase in the number of initial recommendations by the International Protection Office in relation to applications, a majority for refusal, but the backlog of cases pending continued to climb steeply and stood at 21,850 by the end of that year, up from about 6,000 in the space of two years.
The increase was partly the result of a substantial growth in the number of appeals, up by 305 per cent from 2022 – a pattern that was reflected in other areas of the wider process, with the number of judicial reviews taken in the asylum list of the High Court more than doubling from 336 to 779 between 2022 and 2023.
In its recently published draft Programme for Government, the proposed new Coalition has said it will overhaul the current system, legislating to implement the EU Migration and Asylum Pact, and has committed “to delivering a fair, efficient, and sustainable model of accommodating applicants. We will move away from the emergency use of hotels for housing and put in place facilities for those seeking protection on State land.”
“So the whole thing is being redesigned,” Ms Murphy said. “But I think these numbers help to inform what the challenges are in terms of a new system coming in against the backdrop of those big backlogs.”
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