More than half the asylum-seekers who arrived in the State in the year until the end of last April have disappeared. Out of about 10,500 claimants in the 12-month period, only 4,100 remained within the direct provision system last April, according to Noel Waters, the director of the Reception and Integration Agency.

Under the mandatory dispersal programme, asylum-seekers spend up to two weeks in five reception centres in Dublin before being sent outside the capital. Waters says about 1,500 people disappeared within hours of registering their asylum claims, while a further 4,200 left their accommodation in the course of the year.

Up to 1,000 people were exempted from direct provision and the dispersal system due to medical needs or other exceptional circumstances.

Waters says about 60 per cent of single males disappear before they can be dispersed. Some go to work in the black economy, while considerable numbers go to the UK, he says.

Patrick Bolger of IMPACT, the union which represents community welfare officers, says people who have left the direct provision system and forfeited their right to State benefits are ending up on the floors of friends' flats. "Our colleagues in community-based offices are confronting this. We have a very disadvantaged group anyway and there's a potential that a sub-class of a sub-class is being created beneath the layer of an already badly disadvantaged group," Bolger says.

In 2000, Ireland received 10,938 asylum applications. Compared to the size of the total national population, it received the third-largest number of asylum-seekers in 25 European countries, after Slovenia and Belgium. Some 15 per cent of applicants for refugee status are successful.