THREE YEARS after the Department of Justice decided that a Somali woman with refugee status was entitled to be joined here by her husband and three young children, counsel for Minister Dermot Ahern yesterday offered an apology in the High Court for never having told the family as much.
For three years the woman's family lived in an Ethiopian refugee camp, and all the while her anxious letters to the department inquiring about their application to be reunited went unanswered. Blaming a "profound systems failure", the Minister did not dispute the woman's version of events and said he had no excuses for what happened.
The case reveals a staggering sequence of institutional failures. The woman was never told that the department had in August 2005 approved her application for her husband and children to reside with her in Ireland. Despite repeatedly writing to the department about her application, she never received a reply. When she sought access to her file, she was refused, and only when her solicitor obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act did she learn that the visas had been approved. To compound her distress, the Irish Embassy in Addis Ababa turned her family away without visas last month, despite a Department of Justice official having told her documents would be ready for collection.
This is a woman who fled one of the most dangerous places on earth, a country where the UN estimates that violence has led one million people to flee their homes, and the State had already accepted that she was in need of its protection.
She should never have had to take High Court proceedings against the department to secure what was rightfully hers. But by exposing such egregious shortcomings in the immigration system she may have done us all some service. In the short term, it should lead to a thorough review of existing files to ensure that nobody else is in the same situation. A report published by PA Consulting in September 2006 advised that additional resources were required in order to shorten the processing times for family reunion cases, but today's applicants face a wait of at least two years, partly because there are only five officials - two of them part-time - dealing with a backlog of 2,000 cases. Ireland is the only country in the EU that has not set out in law the principles governing all family reunification categories. This should be remedied by amending the Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill.
But there are broader lessons too. The department may lay the blame on a euphemistic "systems failure" but the case indicates a long-standing political failure to put in place fair, efficient and transparent procedures not only for family reunion but across the immigration system. As support groups have pointed out, the sense of disregard and isolation felt by the Somali woman in this case will be familiar to many others who have dealt with the same authorities. The Minister is right to order a review of procedures, but it is an unsympathetic mindset as much as a system that is to blame for this debacle.