It is likely that as many as seven in 10 asylum-seekers in Ireland were smuggled there, a British researcher has said.
Dr Andrew Bateman, of the University of Swansea, conducted interviews with asylum-seekers in Britain which showed 70 per cent of them had paid a third-party to smuggle them into the country. In some cases those seeking to gain entry paid as much as £10,000 a person.
At the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society in Belfast, Dr Bateman said that although his research had been carried out solely among asylum-seekers in Britain, he would expect a similar pattern among those in Ireland.
In many cases those being smuggled had little say about where they were actually sent, he said.
"We can infer that a majority of asylum-seekers who end up in Ireland could have been smuggled there with the help of agents and that the agents determined that they ended up there."
The conference also heard predictions of severe water shortages for countries which depend on rivers draining high mountain areas such as the Alps and the Himalayas.
Prof David Collins, of Salford University, said global warming had led to water draining more quickly from glaciers than was being added.
River flows have increased since the cooler 1970s as glaciers created during the Little Ice Age of the 17th and 18th centuries melted but Prof Collins said this trend could not go on for ever.
"The \ combination of warmer summers and drier winters, meaning less snow to feed the glaciers, has meant that the vast bank of ice on the mountain tops is disappearing. The ice is like money in the bank; if you keep drawing more than you put in, eventually it runs out."
Prof Collins said well over 100 million people in central Asia would be vulnerable when the decrease in flows from "the world's high water towers" began in the next 30 to 50 years.
People in areas such as the Indus valley in Pakistan and in much of central Asia would be especially vulnerable as almost all their water came from the rivers draining the mountain.
In a paper entitled "Irish Grannies and Plastic Paddies", Dr David Storey described his research into why second or third generation Irish soccer players played for Ireland.
Dr Storey, from University College Worcester, said he and his colleague, Dr Michael Holmes, from the Liverpool Hope University College, were both Irish and both football fans.
"It's fair to say it originated as a pub conversation and eventually we decided, 'well hang on, let's stop talking about this and do something about it'," he said.
Dr Storey said players often claimed they felt they were Irish and were not simply playing for Ireland to enjoy international careers they would not otherwise have had. "Whether that's what they mean or they are just saying it for public consumption is something we will look into."
One well publicised paper given earlier at the conference suggested that sectarian divisions in Belfast were greater now even than before the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994. Another suggested the city was in fact more polarised than at any other time in its history.
In the past it had been thought that sectarian division in the city had increased and decreased in parallel with rising and falling levels of violence but Prof Fred Boal, of Queen's University, now spoke of a "segregation ratchet" with levels of segregation never really decreasing.
The kind of sectarian violence which provoked people to retreat into their "own" areas seemed to stay in the folk memory and make them reluctant to move out again.
Dr Brendan Murtagh, also from Queen's, said Belfast had a small but significant integrated public housing stock. This had been declining over the years but "there has been very little intervention by housing managers and planners to try and stop that".
Research by Dr Karen Lysaght, of the University of Ulster, and Prof James Anderson, of Queen's, highlighted the way in which segregation had become "routineised" in parts of Belfast.