Madam, - I wish to refute Breda O'Brien's suggestion (Opinion, June 7th) that recent improvements in asylum application processing times have come at the expense of quality.
In particular, Ms O'Brien erroneously infers from the number of persons granted refugee status in Ireland on appeal that the "system makes the wrong decision the first time, more often than not". Ironically, Ms O'Brien goes on from this error to conclude that a "Leaving Cert student making that level of mistakes would be in deep trouble".
For the record, decisions by the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner at first stage were upheld on appeal in 77 per cent of all cases in 2002 and in 80 per cent of cases the first five months of 2003. It should be noted that these figures relate only to those decisions which were actually appealed. If decisions which were not appealed were also taken into account, together with those decisions reached following the applicant's failure to attend for interview, then the percentage of first-stage decisions upheld or unchallenged would in fact be far higher.
While my office carefully monitors performance at appeal as part of our commitment to assuring quality, the above figures do not to my mind give rise to a cause for concern and they most certainly do not suggest that increased processing has come at the expense of quality. - Yours, etc.,
BERENICE O'NEILL,
Refugee Applications
Commissioner,
Lower Mount Street,
Dublin 2.