Administrative paralysis in the Government rather than the large increase in the number of asylum seekers created Ireland's refugee crisis, said an expert in refugee law, Rosemary Byrne of TCD, in a perceptive comment at the beginning of this year. Last month's opening of a "one stop shop" centre for refugees and asylum seekers in Dublin's Upper Mount Street would appear to have been a significant breakthrough in tackling that paralysis. For the first time the Department of Justice's asylum division, the Eastern Health Board's refugee unit, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) Irish office and the lawyers hearing appeals against rejection of asylum will be in the same building.
Over 140 specially trained staff, many of them retired gardai and social workers, will be in situ.
However, it will take more than a new suite of offices and some new staff to shift the government out of the inertia and neglect which has characterised much of its policy on asylum seekers since their arrival in Ireland first became a problem nearly two years ago.
There have been some good developments. The UNHCR advice and staff training courses have been warmly welcomed by a Department of Justice totally unprepared for dealing with an annual influx which grew from a few dozen in the early 1990s to 34,000 in 1997 and 1998. The two lawyers recently appointed to act as "appeal authorities" for rejected asylum seekers are seen as fair-minded and independent men with a knowledge and understanding of the plight of such people.
But there are still blockages in the system, piecemeal reforms and plain reluctance by civil servants to move which will certainly lead to major injustices further down the line.
There are no interpreters at ports of entry. There is going to be a huge bottleneck caused by the appeals of the thousand or so people who have had applications rejected and have been waiting for the four new "appeal authorities" - now reduced to two - to start work. Legal aid for such appellants is still uncertain after a tendering process failed to come up with a satisfactory bid.
There has been almost no thinking about what will be done with the people coming out at the other end of the asylum application pipeline: those who are rejected on appeal; those who are given humanitarian - now apparently renamed temporary - leave to remain; and those who are given official recognition as refugees.
A lot of people in the first category are going to be deported, conjuring up a picture of ugly scenes at ports and airports. A lot of the people in the second two categories are going to be left in limbo because no government department or any other official body is making any systematic preparations to help them integrate into Irish society. They will be added to the 500 or so people with Irish-born babies whose registration as legally resident foreigners is being held up despite a Supreme Court ruling that as parents of a baby who is an Irish citizen, they must be given the right to stay.
Meanwhile different departments have been sending out confusing signals. The junior minister at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Liz O'Donnell, announced in September that the Government would very soon be publishing a "comprehensive discussion document" on asylum-seekers and refugees. She promised all sorts of good things such as language support and training, assistance with integration, family reunification programmes and anti-racism education.
However, the Department of Justice appeared to know little about this document. Few other people do either, since the inter-departmental committee apparently preparing it is working almost completely behind closed doors and is taking no submissions from outside groups.
In the Justice Department they seem much more interested in a proposal from the Minister, Mr O'Donoghue, borrowed from a British White Paper, to cut back on social welfare payments to asylum seekers in favour of providing them with "direct supports" of clothes, food and accommodation. Senior officials in the Department of Social, Family and Community Affairs are known to be opposed to this plan on humanitarian grounds.
Giving asylum-seekers the right to work is another issue on which Ms O'Donnell, who is in favour, and Mr O'Donoghue, who is strongly against - have differed. Informed insiders suggest that given the huge backlog of asylum applications, which will probably take several years to clear, there will have to be some reconsideration of this. In Britain, which the Department of Justice always watches with an eagle eye because of the common travel area, they allow asylum seekers to work after six months.
The Department of Justice's perceived hard-line stance has led many who work with and for asylum seekers to believe its only agenda is to deport as many of these unfortunates back to their countries of origin as soon as is legally and practically possible. The angry accusations against department officials at the recent conference on a multiethnic Ireland in TCD were eloquent testimony to that.
However, such a judgment is not completely fair. There are senior officials in the department who are genuinely wrestling with serious humanitarian and logistical problems which no-one could have foreseen two short years ago. There is a real danger that in an increasingly polarised atmosphere - with campaigning and support groups seeing the department as heartless "devils", and officials believing the campaigners are ignoramuses who know nothing about the complexity of the problem - it will be the refugees who will suffer. e" about asylum seekers sponging off the welfare system, with not a mention of the fact that the reason they can't work is because the Government won't let them.
Meanwhile we can expect the pace of deportations - which have not reached 50 so far - to increase towards the end of this year and early next year. It will be interesting to see if the conscience of Christian Ireland is pricked when that starts happening in earnest, or if the "me fein" mentality of the Celtic Tiger culture will prevail.