Deportation: 35 people were escorted from the State by gardaí in first four months of the year

Thirty-five people were personally escorted from the State by members of the Garda National Immigration Bureau in the first four months of the year, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee has said.

While this is a substantial increase when compared to the same period last year, it represents less than 10 per cent of the 444 deportation orders issued so far this year.

In response to a parliamentary question from her Fine Gael colleague Charlie Flanagan, Ms McEntee also said the State intends to begin charter flights later this year to deport people who no longer have a legal right to be in the State.

This would be expected to lead to a significant increase in the number of deportations as the bureau currently uses commercial flights for such operations.

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Ms McEntee said 52 deportation orders were enforced last year, double the number recorded in 2022. Based on current rates, it is likely that more than 100 people will be subject to enforced deportations from the State this year.

The home countries of the people deported were not disclosed in the Minister’s reply.

A further 136 people have left the State so far this year under a voluntary return programme, where they receive assistance in buying flights to their home countries. These cases do not require deportation orders. There was a total of 213 people returned to their home countries last year under the programme.

Mr Flanagan welcomed the increase but said the number of people being deported without the right to remain in Ireland remained low. “These figures show that while the system is not broken, enforcement of orders remains a key challenge for agencies involved,” he said.

Ms McEntee said in her reply that enforced deportation operations were complex and costly. “They often involve detailed detection work, detentions in custody, legal challenges, complications with obtaining travel documents, and of course, the cost of flights and related matters.”

The number of deportations fell sharply during the Covid-19 pandemic but they have increased sharply in the past year.

In 2019, the last year in which a significant number of deportations occurred, a total of 155 people were forcibly deported and a further 94 returned voluntarily before receiving orders. The total costs of the operations was €1.2 million or about €5,000 per case.

The highest individual cost was €186,000 for a charter flight that deported 19 Albanian nationals and four Georgian nationals.

In the reply, Ms McEntee argued that most people left the State voluntarily but as there were no routine exit checks at Irish borders, she accepted it was not possible to quantify the numbers.

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