Plans to fingerprint asylum-seekers on arrival in the State was one of a long list of recent disturbing developments, the chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council told the conference.
Mr Peter O'Mahony said the list included the proposed use of "flotels", the current method of dispersing asylum-seekers around the State and catering for them through the "direct provision" of food and accommodation.
He said the "security bias" which dominated Government thinking was part of the reason that asylum has become a contentious issue. A much greater human rights focus was imperative, similar to that which guided the arrival of 1,000 Kosovan refugees in Ireland last year.
Mr O'Mahony drew a distinction between the compassionate treatment of the Kosovars then and the current attitude to refugees and asylum-seekers.
He said some of the political leaders who had welcomed the Kosovars had played a part in allowing irresponsible, emotive and often misleading language, such as "illegal" and "bogus" to describe asylum-seekers to gain currency.
While acknowledging the significant efforts of the Government in dealing with the increased numbers of asylum-seekers, Mr O'Mahony said the system was unable to cope.
He said the scale of the issue, with some 12,000 asylum-seekers due to arrive by the end of this year, was well within our capacity to deal with. The backlog of asylum claims to be processed needed to be reduced to six months or all other efforts would be undermined.
"Justice delayed is justice denied. The Government has to show convincing evidence that full examination - not fast-tracking - of people's asylum claims will indeed be completed in something close to the accepted six-month target and that the various bottlenecks in the system are dealt with.
"Failing this, alternatives such as the regularisation options recently put forward by the Catholic Bishops' Conference and summarily dismissed by the Government will have to be re-examined."
Mr Paul Cullen, the Irish Times Development Correspondent, appealed for political leadership on the immigration issue in the run-up to the next general election. He said there would be a temptation for politicians to make capital out of the resentment felt by some communities to the dispersal of asylum-seekers and this would be a disaster.