Only 19 of more than 1,000 people issued with decisions to have their applications for asylum assessed in another EU member state were transferred out of Ireland over the past five years.
New figures issued by the Department of Justice show 1,037 international protection applicants were subject to Dublin III transfer decisions between 2021 and 2025.
The Dublin III regulation is designed to dissuade asylum seekers making applications in more than one country. Under the regulation, the country of first entry into the EU is normally responsible for processing the claim.
However, less than 2 per cent of those subject to a Dublin III transfer in Ireland were actually sent back to the EU state they first entered.
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The information was released by Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan in response to a parliamentary question from Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín.
The number of decisions issued fell during the Covid pandemic to 69 in 2021 and 24 in 2022. However, since then they have increased sharply; there were 188 in 2023, 339 in 2024 and 417 in 2025.
Against that, the number of decisions given effect to has remained very low. There were only two transfers out of Ireland last year despite the highest number of decisions, eight in 2024 and three in 2023.
In his written response to Tóibín, O’Callaghan admitted there were difficulties with implementing the Dublin III regulation.
“In practice, and in keeping with the experience of other member states, effective implementation of the Dublin regulation is challenging,” he said.
“Member states have found significant problems with the Dublin regulation, including the lack of consistent implementation across the member states and that shortcomings with the design of the regulation makes it difficult to achieve its main objectives.”
He said he had increased the permissible detention period to facilitate a transfer from seven to 42 days.
O’Callaghan said this would give the Garda National Immigration Bureau more capacity to make the required arrangements in advance of the transfer.
He said a “major benefit” of Ireland signing up to the EU asylum and migration pact is that it will replace Dublin III with what he described as a “more efficient and streamlined process”.
In outlining the process, O’Callaghan suggested that data about previous countries where applicants had applied was not stored in an easily extractable manner.
He added, however, that when a person was granted international protection status in another country, this was registered on Eurodac, the EU’s centralised asylum system database.
Figures supplied by the department showed that 361 people who applied for asylum in Ireland in 2025 had already been granted international protection in another EU state.
In all, 1,165 people who have applied for asylum in Ireland over the past five years have already had that status granted in another EU State.
Tóibin said it was shocking the Minister did not know how many people arriving in Ireland had originally applied for asylum in another EU country.
“What information they do have shows a big increase in the numbers of asylum seekers coming from other countries,” he said. “We have a lot of people who are coming into my constituency offices who originally applied for asylum in Italy. Last year there was a period where many people coming into my constituency office had applied originally in Sweden.”
He also pointed out that in previous responses, the Department of Justice had said that as many as 85 per cent of people who were coming into the State had come in from Britain via Northern Ireland.
“Of the 417 Dublin III transfer decisions issued last year only two happened. That’s a stunning failure to implement the law,” he said. “That’s an effectiveness of less than 0.5 per cent. The Government has failed miserably to implement agreed European law.”
