Racist incidents will be monitored under a self-reporting system announced yesterday by a Government advisory body.
Victims denied access to public places or shops or subject to attack or racist jokes can send details to a new database operated by the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI).
The new system was announced at a seminar in Dublin yesterday on strategies for including asylum-seekers and refugees in local development.
The NCCRI director, Mr Philip Watt, said there was evidence that many victims of racist incidents were not reporting them to gardai because they had had very negative experiences of police in their home countries.
Mr Watt said the information would be gathered through self-reporting by community groups and organisations, with the results published annually.
Representatives of community groups and the State's 38 area-based partnership companies attended yesterday's seminar, jointly organised by Area Development Management Ltd and the NCCRI.
Ms Siobhan O'Donoghue from the Galway-based Community Workers' Co-op told a workshop the Government had failed to live up to a commitment in the Partnership for Peace and Fairness to fund community groups to support refugees and asylum-seekers.
"We understood that about £1 million was to be allocated every year to provide resources for asylum-seekers and refugees, but this has not materialised," she said.
Opening the seminar, the Minister of State, Mr Eoin Ryan, said it would be an ironic betrayal of Ireland's own migratory past if the State was to foster a climate in which racism, hate and prejudice were to take hold.
Only 7 per cent of asylum-seekers were granted refugee status last year, entitling them to live and work permanently in Ireland. This suggested that many who came to Ireland were in fact economic migrants, as were so many Irish over the past 100 years, he said.