State services for asylum-seekers cost €340 million last year, the Minister of State for Health and Children, Mr Brian Lenihan, said. Outlining the facilities available, he said: "It is undeniably a fair and generous system." But, he added, it was not without room for improvement.
"Those who are operating this independent system acknowledge that, notwithstanding the great improvements in the Irish asylum process in recent years, there are some in-built inefficiencies which require statutory amendment.
"The Minister is striving for a system which continues to provide the requisite high standard of fairness, but achieves that standard with more efficient use of time and resources."
Mr Lenihan said that most people who claimed to be fleeing from persecution were not doing so at all.
"Even allowing some margin for those who, while not strictly within the criteria of the Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees, are otherwise in need of the protection of the State, the fact, independently arrived at by the Refugee Applications Commissioner and the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, is that close to nine out of every 10 asylum applicants in Ireland have no basis for their claim to be refugees.
"That bespeaks unsustainably high levels of abuse of a system designed to help the weak and unprotected."
It was not fair on the vulnerable individuals who had genuine claims, and whose recognition was delayed by unfounded asylum claims. "It is not fair to those who pay Irish taxes to maintain that 90 per cent while their claims are being examined," said Mr Lenihan.
"The Minister has no intention to do anything that would undermine the sound principles on which that system is built. However, it is not a corollary of a fair system that it should be supine in the face of obvious abuse as if such abuse were of no real consequence for those who genuinely seek the protection of the State."
Mr Lenihan was introducing the Immigration Bill, 2002, which provided a scheme of "carrier liability" designed to ensure to the greatest extent possible that when people arrived in the State, from places other than the common travel area within the United Kingdom, they had proper travel documentation.
The Fine Gael spokesman on justice, Mr John Deasy, said that while the Bill made it an offence for carriers to transport migrants, regardless of their asylum status, without valid documentation, it did not distinguish between political and economic refugees.
"That is something we will have to thrash out at committee stage."
Warning that people could not have it both ways, Mr Deasy said it was not so long ago that 58 people were suffocated in the back of a container lorry. "We need to impose severe penalties on those people who are prepared to bring illegals into this country," he added.
The EU needed to harmonise its laws when it came to carriers who were prepared to take the risk of bringing illegals into the country. He added that about 80 per cent to 90 per cent of immigrants were economic, as opposed to political, refugees. "We need proper restrictions on access to this country. My party and I will support sensible measures in this regard, " he said.
Mr Deasy said there was a "growing mob element" fuelled by racism. "There is an ugliness creeping into our society. It has got to the point where someone with dark skin is perceived immediately to be an asylum-seeker, and therefore a sponger."
The Labour spokesman on justice, Mr Joe Costello, said the legislation was not balanced. "We need a balanced and sympathetic approach to non-nationals who come here, which recognises we are not an insular society but a global one and that we are part of both the European Union and the world body of nations," he added.
Mr Costello said that major questions of racism, interculturalism and multiculturalism needed to be addressed, in addition to obvious issues such as the manner in which asylum-seekers and non-nationals who came here in search of work were dealt with.
Mr Aengus Ó Snodaigh (SF, Dublin South East) said a raft of reforms was needed but were not addressed in the Bill. Present provisions were not only woefully inadequate, but negative, backward and xenophobic.
Mr Ciaran Cuffe (Green Party, Dún Laoghaire) said his party opposed the Government's shift of responsibility of decision-making on to people not trained in immigration procedures.
