Asylum-seekers who arrive in Ireland this time next year are likely to be met with a very different State welcome to that which has awaited the 17,000 or so who have sought refuge here to date.
Instead of getting cash social welfare payments, they will receive some sort of payments in kind, such as food vouchers or direct-debit cards.
Instead of staying initially in B & Bs, hostels or even city-centre parks, they will be temporarily housed in a Dublin reception centre before being moved on to longer-stay accommodation, most likely outside the capital.
These are, at the time of writing at least, the Government's main planned changes to the reception process for asylum-seekers.
Dispersal and direct provision are the latest buzz-words in asylum-seeker reception policy, with a special inter-departmental directorate set up to co-ordinate and plan for their formal implementation early next year.
Dispersal means moving asylum-seekers to areas outside of greater Dublin, where 85 per cent of them are housed. Direct provision means taking all or some of the cash out of the social welfare system. Many other EU states have already implemented such policies, or are planning them soon.
The objectives of the policies are clear: to prevent a repeat of the recent accommodation crisis in Dublin which led to asylum-seekers "sleeping rough", and to deter others coming here by reducing any "pull factor" that a generous welfare system might have.
These policies go hand-in-hand with major staff increases aimed at clearing the current backlog of 8,725 asylum applications and reducing the time taken to process an application from up to two years to six months.
While the exact type of direct provision the State will use has not yet been decided, the refugee lobby and support groups have already nailed their colours to the mast in opposition to it.
They say it is demeaning and stigmatising, would deny choice to asylum-seekers, and might even fall foul of the Constitution because it is discriminatory.
"It's such a huge imposition on their freedom of action," says Mr Piaras Mac Einri, the director of the Irish Centre for Migration Studies in Cork. "What argument can you make in favour of it?"
The Government's argument is that Britain is bringing in direct provision next year, and so the Republic must be ready to do the same. In Britain, all eligible asylum-seekers will, from next April, receive £10 each a week in cash and the remaining welfare support in vouchers. New asylum-seekers will not be able to live in London or Kent, unless they stay with friends. "Because of our common travel area with the United Kingdom, the Government position is that we are likely to have an even larger influx of asylum-seekers," says Ms Berenice O'Neill, the chairwoman of the interdepartmental directorate. "We would then be the only country in Europe with as generous a welfare system without direct provision."
The British government has acknowledged that direct provision, by basically setting up a parallel social welfare system for asylum-seekers, will cost more than the normal cash-based system. So is there any evidence that such an investment will pay "dividends" by deterring asylum-seekers from coming to Britain and the Republic? Based on what little research there is, the answer is no. A European Commission survey of asylum-seekers in Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium published last year found that the generosity of a state's welfare provision was not a factor in any "check-list" of host countries that they may have had.
Asylum-seekers said they were mainly influenced by practical matters, such as to where they were physically able to travel or where they had family members, colonial or political ties or language connections.
"It's slightly illogical to justify this more expensive provision on the grounds that it will deter people without there being any evidence that asylum-seekers chose a country on the basis of welfare provisions available in that country," says Ms Clara Odofin, legal officer at the European Council for Refugees and Exiles, a London-based body which promotes a humane and generous asylum policy in Europe.
Civil liberties groups in Ireland are worried that the informal "harmonisation" of reception conditions for asylum-seekers in Europe can only mean downward harmonisation for Ireland.
"Just because it's being done elsewhere in Europe doesn't mean that you have to transpose a `fortress Europe' concept to this jurisdiction," says Mr Donncha O'Connell, the director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. "There are numerous aspects of British criminal law that you wouldn't want to follow in this jurisdiction. This is more than a numbers game and if we want to insulate ourselves from any surpluses that the UK has, the question has to be asked at a moral level whether that balances human rights considerations with other policy considerations in the area."
To see the pitfalls to avoid in the dispersal programme, the Government need look no further than the experience of hundreds of asylum-seekers currently living outside Dublin. Simply providing an asylum-seeker with a one-way ticket to Waterford and a room in a local B & B is clearly not enough.
Ms Orla Ni Eili, from the Irish Refugee Council's branch in Ennis, Co Clare, where there are some 300 asylum-seekers and refugees, says "dig-out" systems need to be ready to meet a "myriad of needs".
These range from practical day-to-day matters such as how to work a washing machine, to the need for accessible, free and local legal advice, as well as emotional support, language classes and opportunities to socialise and form self-help groups.
"It's a very complex area and every need has a myriad of other needs," she says.
"This is natural because they are coming from a totally different experience and to think that they can fit into an existing infrastructure of a community welfare officer and somewhere to live is unrealistic for everybody. So let's put the support systems in place and try to short-circuit the system that we have blundered through so far."
The key to decentralising the reception of asylum-seekers is to decentralise services and co-ordinate them at regional level, says Mr Mac Einri, the co-author of a recent report on the issue. "We need to embed the asylum-seekers' services in local systems, and not from Dublin down."
Some 8,000 offers of accommodation outside greater Dublin were made in response to a recent Government advertisement, but many will not be suitable, says Ms O'Neill.
Before inspections of these premises are even completed, there are concerns that not all local authorities are ready or willing to welcome asylum-seekers. It is understood that in one large local authority area, only two premises were offered in response to the advertisement.
"If you look at the responses of local authorities around the country, the attitude appears to be that it's not our problem, it's Dublin's problem," says Mr Mac Einri.
"What I would like to see is a much more pro-active role at local level, both the official local level and the community-based local level."
The interdepartmental directorate has invited input from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on the dispersal policy and, according to Ms O'Neill, wants to involve NGOs and community groups in educating and preparing host communities.
"It is our intention that there should be a strategic approach to dispersal," she says. "It is not our intention to have anything ad hoc, but our priority at the moment has to be to ensure that people are not sleeping on the streets. Dispersal will be done in a proper, orderly, planned strategic way."