A REFUGEE support group suspects there may be a “huge number” of people in the same situation as a Somali woman whose husband and three children were left in an Ethiopian refugee camp for three years because of a Government error.
Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern last week apologised before the High Court to the woman over a “profound systems failure” which meant the family was never told of the department’s decision to grant them visas in 2005.
Sr Breege Keenan of the Vincentian Refugee Centre in Dublin said: “My gut reaction is there are many, many more in exactly the same situation – people who might have got a positive decision and never been told. My hunch is there’s a huge number in that category.”
She was aware of cases of refugees who were not informed that their applications for family reunification were unsuccessful, and many others who had difficulties accessing information on their cases.
“The whole thing is in a shambles. One of my concerns is that when someone in the family reunification unit makes a decision, there’s nobody overseeing that decision. Who are they accountable to?
“We had a woman – a refugee – and she was refused permission to bring her husband to Ireland. And then she re-applied and she got it.”
The department says five people are employed in the family reunification unit, two of whom work part-time. Currently they are dealing with a backlog of some 2,000 cases.
Sr Breege, who runs a popular drop-in centre in Phibsboro, said there was a clear need for more resources for the unit and for better communications between staff and applicants.
A telephone number was manned for several hours a week, but refugees found it extremely difficult to reach a staff member this way.
Most frustrating was that departmental staff, as a matter of course, replied to applicants’ queries with a standard letter and without looking into their file, Sr Breege said. “They open the file and the letter goes into it. But they don’t look into the case,” she added.
The Somali woman who took last week’s case was never told of the department’s decision to grant her family visas to join her here in August 2005. She then made several unsuccessful efforts over the past three years to find out what was happening to her application. It was only when her solicitor secured her department file under the Freedom of Information Act late last year that she realised the visas had been issued three years earlier.
“I don’t think really understand the trauma that the people are going through, sitting here waiting for their family member to come in. They’re just a number.
“I don’t think they see the human beings behind the stories,” Sr Breege said yesterday.
“We have a man who gave up his work because of the stress of it all. For the spouse in the country of origin, they presume that once the husband or wife has come to Ireland, that they’ve made it and that they can start a new life. The spouse at home feels they’re not wanted – that the husband or wife has forgotten about them.
“And it’s very difficult to keep up the communication, particularly if you’re talking about somebody in Darfur, for example, in a refugee camp.”
