Kitty Holland reports on the Irish side of this week's deportation operation.
The operation to deport 65 failed asylum-seekers began in earnest early Wednesday morning as Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) officers began arresting 53 Romanian and 12 Moldovan failed asylum-seekers at their homes in counties Wicklow, Meath, Westmeath and Dublin. Identified weeks in advance for deportation, some had moved address and had to be traced, says Chief Supt Donnellan.
Following arrest, they were held overnight in Mountjoy and Cloverhill prisons before being transported to Dublin Airport for their dawn flight.
Some 35 gardaí, a doctor and interpreters also travelled and further gardaí were waiting in Bucharest, Romania and the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, to assist authorities there in processing the deportees' papers.
The entire operation, excluding the GNIB manpower necessary to trace and detain the deportees and the overnight time in prison, cost €93,500, or just over €1,400 a head.
Expensive, but according to the head of the GNIB, Chief Supt Martin Donnellan, the most efficient and cost-effective means of deportation. Until now, deportations have mainly been conducted using scheduled flights. Chief Supt Donnellan predicts the trend will be towards "giant charters" used in conjunction with other EU states.
This drive for value appears to be working. The €1,400 per head cost of Thursday's operation compares with last year when 590 people were deported, at a cost of €1,569,783 or €2,660 per head. In 2002, a total of 521 people were deported at a cost of €1,816,314, or €3,486 a head.
Chief Supt Donnellan contrasts the number of deportations with the numbers applying for asylum: 11,634 in 2002, 7,939 last year. Over five years there have been about 60,000 applications. "If even only half of those fail [in their asylum claim\] or drop out of the system, that's the guts of 30,000 people at the moment who should legally be deported."
Almost 90 per cent of applications for asylum here are turned down, although the Irish Refugee Council points out the definition of refugee is unusually narrow here and those who do not meet the criteria may have good reason to fear returning to their original country.
Last year, 2,428 deportation orders were signed by the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, compared with the 590 deportations which were effected.
The figures put the deportation of 65 Eastern Europeans on Thursday in perspective. Although it was the single biggest multiple deportation effected yet by the GNIB, it hardly amounts to a massive crackdown.
In any event, Donnellan agrees that many of this week's 65 deportees would be "back and forth, in and out" of the State.
Moves to deter people seeking asylum or residency here in the first place, including the declaration of countries such as Romania and Bulgaria as "safe", and the removal last year of the automatic right to residency on the basis of having an Irish-born child, are having an impact. The number of asylum applications was down 32 per cent on 2002.
At the same time, more money is being ploughed into sending people who have no legal right to be in the State back to their country of origin.
The GNIB is to increase its manpower to the tune of 35 gardaí and five sergeants in Dublin, with further increases in Cork and at the Border with Northern Ireland. The repatriation section at the Department of Justice's Immigration Unit has 50 new staff, with more due to come on board next month.
At their meeting last month in Dublin, EU justice and home affairs ministers agreed to commit €30 million immediately to increasing co-operation on the return of failed asylum seekers.
Currently, the GNIB does not have top-of-the range technology at the ports to detect known failed asylum seekers re-entering the State. While asylum-seekers are fingerprinted when they make an application, the GNIB does not have either finger-printing or - as are used by US immigration - iris scanners to verify people's identity when they arrive.