Sir, – It is difficult to understand why the Minister for Integration, who presides over a system here in Ireland which still houses international protection applicants in tents, now appears to be taking the lead in calling for the expansion of the international asylum regime to include a new criteria for climate migrants (“Coalition at odds over proposals to expand asylum system to include climate migrants”, News, January 9th).
Surely the focus should be to get our own house in order. Recent official statistics show that the system is currently dealing with over 12,000 asylum applicants, a 470 per cent increase over the same period in 2021, of which 20 per cent (2,500) are from Georgia. This particular country has been designated under Irish law as a safe country of origin and yet there is no official record of any Georgian nationals having been returned to their home country in order to free up our system to deal properly with those applicants who are fleeing war and persecution. – Yours, etc,
MARTIN McDONALD,
Terenure,
Ann Ingle: Deliberately going out of my way to move for no particular reason has never appealed to me
Gerry Thornley: How about an alternative look at Ireland’s Six Nations win over England?
Is Ireland anti-Semitic, an outlier of tolerance or in the middle ground?
How risky is it to buy a second-hand EV?
Dublin 12.
