An ante-natal clinic for pregnant asylum-seekers has been set up in north County Dublin as part of measures to help ease the pressure on the capital's maternity hospitals.
Most newly arrived pregnant women will receive initial tests at the clinic, located in the Balseskin reception centre for asylum-seekers, before being allocated accommodation in regions outside Dublin where there are maternity units.
The move is aimed at ensuring that the State's maternity units receive an even spread of births from asylum-seekers, instead of the cases being concentrated largely in Dublin's three main maternity hospitals as is currently the case.
Officials say some 80 per cent of women of child-bearing age who have sought asylum in the past year were visibly pregnant when they lodged their applications for refugee status.
The new outreach clinic, which opened in the past month, is staffed by three doctors from Dublin's Rotunda Hospital. The hospital's master, Dr Michael Geary, said that out of about 7,000 births in the hospital expected by the end this year, between 1,800 and 2,000 will have been to non-national women, including asylum-seekers, students and migrant workers.
"Our hospital was the first port of call for the majority of asylum-seekers coming to the country and it was putting huge pressure on our emergency room," he said.
The Balseskin clinic is "an effort to take pressure off and provide better and more streamlined visits", said Dr Geary. It is located in the St Margaret's area of Fingal.
Dr Geary said pregnant asylum-seekers who arrive unannounced in the hospital's emergency room are now being referred to the clinic, which is open three mornings a week. Emergency cases will continue to be treated on that basis, he added. Asylum-seekers are accommodated for up to two weeks in Balseskin and two other reception centres before being dispersed to locations outside Dublin while their claims for refugee status are determined.
Pregnant asylum-seekers from Balseskin and Parnell West, in Dublin city, will have blood tests and scans at the new clinic and those with normal pregnancies will then be allocated longer-term accommodation in regions close to maternity units such as Waterford, Cork, Galway and Limerick.
The dispersal of asylum-seekers outside Dublin has been mandatory for the past two years in an effort to ease accommodation pressures in Dublin.
It is estimated that overall, some 10 per cent of the 58,000 births in the State last year were to non-nationals. About 20 per cent of the 7,689 births in the Coombe Women's Hospital in Dublin last year were to non-nationals.
The authorities have been concerned in recent years about the increasing numbers of immigrant women turning up unplanned in Dublin maternity hospitals at advanced stages of their pregnancies. They were concerned that such women were targeting Ireland because children born here are automatically Irish citizens from birth and it had been the practice in recent years to grant their parents residency.