Okanlawon Akinola is on his way to getting off the dole. He will soon complete a six-month FAS course in software testing, and is reasonably confident of finding work.

But while the 32-year-old Nigerian asylum-seeker is job searching, he will also be flat hunting. His family, including his one-month-old son who is facing an operation next month, have been told by the Eastern Health Board that they must find their own accommodation.

Their one bedroom Dublin flat is classified as short-term emergency accommodation, which a spokeswoman for the board said was usually reserved for clients for three months only.

Okanlawon, his wife Omopeju (28) and their three children aged under three years have been living there for a year, after moving to Ireland in February 1998.

Okanlawon is articulate and intelligent and clearly frustrated by his current situation. He says he has looked for an apartment, but feels he is discriminated against in an already overcrowded rental market for belonging to an ethnic minority and being on rent allowance.

His family receives £154 per week, in addition to having their rent and electricity bills paid by the EHB.

Okanlawon, who worked as an administrator in Nigeria, has written numerous letters to the EHB, with suggestions and complaints about various aspects of his treatment as an asylum-seeker. While he has had replies, he says nothing has been significantly changed to improve the daily problems people in his position face.

He sums up his general sense of powerlessness by saying he feels like a "ghost without a voice" in Irish society.

"I don't want to live like this," he says as his two older children play in front of him on the floor of their small, clean living room.

"It's frustrating because you can't work and people can abuse you. If I was able to do the FAS course before now, maybe I would have had a job by now, instead of living on welfare."

Access to training courses and education is denied to most asylum-seekers until they achieve refugee status. In Okanlawon's case, he was able to take part in a FAS course because he has residency rights in the State due to having two Irish-born children.

For asylum-seekers with little or no education, welfare dependency is inevitable, says Philip Watt, the director of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, which advises Government on policy.

Most asylum-seekers are reliant on secondary benefits such as EHB rent payments and free medical treatment, he says.

With average rents in Dublin of between £300 and £500 for a one-bedroom apartment, an asylum-seeker or refugee would have to get a well paid job to make up for losing such secondary benefits.

"There has been a lot of focus on the right to work and problems in relation to reception, but virtually nothing about the long-term integration of refugees and asylum-seekers in Ireland," says Mr Watt. "There needs to be a much more overall approach to the process of integration which looks at a whole variety of issues such as education and access to language and training and also just survival."

Another asylum-seeker, who did not want to be named, is a qualified accountant and is looking for a job. He said it was a matter of pride for him to find work and try to play a role in society.

He said: "Asylum-seekers could be trained to do work that would be useful for the Government. The hospitals and the Department of Justice need interpreters, so why not train people to do interpreting jobs in their own language, instead of keeping them living on the dole?"

He answers his own question thus: "The Government's policy is a policy of social exclusion. They don't want the asylum-seekers to integrate as they are going to deport most of them anyway."

Kapinga Mukendi, a Congolese woman living in Tallaght, told yesterday's UNHCR conference that mothers are often unable to help her children with their schoolwork as they have not themselves received any education.

"We were always hearing about the great contribution Irish people make when they emigrate, even becoming the president of America," she said.

"All we are asking is to be able to make a contribution. It says in the Bible that the house that receives guests is a blessed house."