The recruitment of 370 new staff is among additional resources to speed up the processing of asylum applications in a package announced yesterday by the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue.
The Minister has received Government approval for the immediate recruitment of the extra staff to deal with asylum processing, appeals and the repatriations.
The number of asylum applications in the State has risen dramatically in recent years, from a level of just over 400 in 1995 to over 7,700 last year. The number of applications currently on hand is in the region of 12,000, with over 5,000 new applications received so far this year.
Mr O'Donoghue said that Ireland is now in the second place in the EU in terms of asylum applications received as a proportion of total population.
The additional resources will allow quicker decisions in relation to applications for refugee status and will lead in due course to the completion of the processing of all new asylum applications in a six-month period, Mr O'Donoghue said.
Last month, the Irish Bishops' Conference said the Government's failure to cut processing times for asylum applications to six months, as promised, had undermined the development of a "humane and sustainable" policy.
Apart from swelling the backlog of unprocessed applications, it had given rise to unnecessary accommodation pressures, the bishops said.
The Minister said the measures announced yesterday are in addition to a series of initiatives already in place to deal with illegal immigration.
He said he expected to announce a readmission agreement for illegal immigrants from Nigeria and Poland by the end of the year. The Minister recently signed such an agreement with Romania.
The increased staffing resources will also be utilised to process claims for residency and naturalisation.