Department of Education officials were told by the Department of Justice's immigration section that asylum-seekers should not have access to education.
Writing to the City of Dublin VEC last month, a senior Department of Education official noted that the advice from the immigration section of the Department of Justice was that asylum-seekers "are not supposed to work, and I have been told, but not in writing, that they should not have access to education".
The letter accompanied an "information note" sent to school and college principals in the Dublin area, instructing them that asylum-seekers must pay more than £2,000 a year to take Post Leaving Certificate courses. PLC courses, which are free to Irish and EU students, are the fastest-growing sector in the education system.
A Department of Justice spokesman said yesterday: "If that remark was made, it does not reflect official Department of Justice policy. No such instruction has been issued to anybody in the Department of Education."
The information note said that asylum-seekers should be allowed to enrol on PLC courses "subject to payment of the economic fee and approval to remain in the State".
The annual "economic fee", or full economic cost, of a PLC course is estimated by the Department of Education at £2,030. Few if any asylum-seekers would be able to afford such a sum. There are some 23,000 PLC students, about 60 per cent of whom now receive maintenance grants.
Asylum-seekers should be told that they "cannot participate until their status has been resolved" with the relevant immigration authorities, i.e. the Department of Justice, the note continued. It stated that these instructions, pending new national policy guidelines which are expected "shortly", applied to students applying for PLC courses starting next autumn.
Sources in the Department of Education have emphasised that the note was not a formal guideline, and further documentation from the Department of Justice would have to be studied before such a guideline was issued.
Senior Department of Education officials are known to be concerned about this issue. They have been active recently in helping refugees and asylum-seekers with their education needs, appointing special teachers to primary schools with high numbers of refugee pupils, and moving quickly to fund a special unit, based at TCD, to oversee adult refugee language training.
The president of the Teachers' Union of Ireland, Mr Joe Carolan, said that forcing asylum-seekers to pay exorbitant fees was unacceptable and discriminatory and would be the subject of an emergency motion at this week's annual congress of the TUI.
The chairman of the Irish Refugee Council, Mr Derek Stewart, commented: "While the council had been looking forward to moves towards asylum-seekers gaining the right to work, although these seem to have been recently abandoned, this seems to be a move in the opposite direction.