Gardaí to clamp down on bogus asylum seekers

FURTHER arrests are expected in a garda clampdown on bogus asylum seekers, following the detention of 17 people at the weekend.

The National Bureau of Immigration said the detainees, from west Africa and eastern Europe, were refused asylum but applied again under different names.

Gardaí said the moves were part of an operation to halt a bid to sabotage the country's asylum process through the submission of bogus applications from foreign nationals.

All of the men and women held throughout the weekend are facing early deportation.

They were arrested in police swoops in Dublin, Cork and Co Clare, and are currently being kept in custody in Mountjoy jail and a number of garda stations.

Deportation awards relating to those detained were understood to have been in existence for some time, but it's understood that they have all lodged new, false applications to stay in the State.

The latest crackdown follows claims last month that almost nine out of 10 asylum applications are now being identified as bogus.

But the chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council, Peter O'Mahony, said the scale of arrests at the weekend did not support these claims.

"If you look back at Operation Hyphen, the assumption at the start was that it would lead to something like 1,800 deportations, but in the end only 16 people were deported.

"Again, this time round, just 17 people are expected to be deported, so the perception that there is wide-scale abuse of the asylum seeker process appears unfounded."

Mr O'Mahony said the IRC had no objection to anyone who made fraudulent claims being deported. He said however that if any of the latest deportees were from EU accession states, then the possibility existed that they could return to Ireland again.

"Our understanding from the Department of Justice is that there will be no way of blocking people from coming back from these countries," Mr O'Mahony said.

Since mid-2000, there have been more than 1,300 deportations, while 1,500 asylum seekers returned home voluntarily.

Last year, 520 people were sent home and approximately 250 have been sent home so far this year.

A further 4,500 were refused permission to land.

Last week, the Irish Prison Service revealed that up to 20 asylum seekers are held in prisons here on a daily basis, the majority of them for breaking immigration laws.

An average of three are awaiting deportation at any one time.

Up to 10,000 immigrants face deportation after a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that non-national parents of Irish-born children do not have an automatic right to live here.

Last year, the Government spent almost €1.7 million deporting illegal immigrants.

Operation Hyphen, a nationwide garda swoop which led to the detention of 140 non-nationals, resulted in only 16 deportations, at an average cost of €6,300 each. It involved 600 gardaí and cost more than €100,000.