Many long-term asylum-seekers living outside Dublin for two years or more may have to move to the capital under a new initiative put in place by the Department of Justice and Law Reform.
The Department says the initiative has been introduced because the number of new applications has been running at almost 800 per month for the first six months of this year.
A Nigerian seeking asylum in Tuam, Co Galway, has been told this will be the only way that he can now qualify for the allowance of €125 a week and self-catering accommodation.
The move to Dublin will be traumatic for many asylum-seekers who have made friends in rural areas where they have been living, according to the mayor of Tuam, Mr Martin Ward.
Mr Ward, who is a Traveller, is lobbying the Minister for Justice to give the asylum-seekers living in the country the same subsistence allowance while allowing them to live outside the capital.
The mayor says he only discovered this new initiative when the Nigerian asylum-seeker, Chuckwudi, who fears death if he goes back home, told him that after two years living in Galway he is being left with no option but to leave all his friends and move to Dublin.
Just when he thought he was making some progress in his campaign on behalf of the Nigerian, Mr Ward says he received a letter informing him of the development from the Department of Justice. The news that Chuckwudi must move to rented accommodation provided for asylum-seekers in Dublin has hit them "like a bolt from the blue", he said.
"I think it's crazy that the Department are willing to put him into self-catering accommodation in Dublin and give him €125 a week while his appeal for asylum here is being considered, yet they will not make the same provisions for him in either Tuam or Galway," said Councillor Ward.
According to the letter sent to Mr Ward by the Department's Reception and Integration Agency, 4,750 applications for asylum here were made in the first six months of this year.
"It was felt that to ensure sufficient accommodation for newly arrived asylum-seekers, the most appropriate persons to transfer to self-catering accommodation should be asylum-seekers who are in direct provision for more than two years," the letter says.
Direct provision means that they have been getting €19.10 per week and they have been put up in hostels around the country. Under this system Chuckwudi has been residing in the Great Western House in Galway up to now.
Chuckwudi is anxiously awaiting a decision by the Department of Justice on his appeal to revoke an earlier decision not to give him refugee status in Ireland and his cause has been championed by Mr Ward for the past few months.
Chuckwudi says he fled to Ireland after one of his friends, who was also a worker in his salt exporting firm, was murdered by Muslim extremists and the business was targeted. This resulted in him losing his livelihood and all his savings back home.