The number of asylum seekers granted refugee status fell to a record low of 1.1 per cent last year with just 24 people granted protection by the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner.
The commissioner's 2010 annual report shows 98.9 per cent of cases in 2010 were either rejected, withdrawn or the asylum seeker concerned was transferred to another EU state to have their case heard.
In 2009 the commissioner recommended granting refugee status to 97 asylum applicants, which amounted to a 2.5 per cent refugee recognition rate.
Figures published by the EU statistics agency Eurostat recently showed Ireland had the lowest refugee recognition rate in the EU.
This finding prompted the UN refugee agency and the UN committee against torture to express concern about the low number of asylum seekers given protection.
Free Legal Advice Centres said today the Government needed to address the extraordinary low recognition rates in Ireland, which were becoming a concern for international legal experts as much as they are for Irish legal experts.
The commissioner's 2010 annual report published today shows 1,939 asylum applications were made in 2010, a 27.9 per cent fall compared to 2009. This is the lowest number of new applications for more than a decade.
Roughly two thirds of applicants for asylum were male and one third were female.
The largest number of applicants came from Nigeria (20 per cent), followed by China (11.8 per cent), Pakistan (10.3 per cent), the Democratic Republic of Congo (3.7 per cent) and Afghanistan (3.6 per cent), says the report.
A total of 2,192 cases were finalised by the office. At the end of the year, there were some 541 cases on hands, 67 cases of which were on hand for over six months.
Some 112 judicial reviews were made against the decision of the commissioner in 2010, slightly up on the 92 judicial reviews made a year earlier.
The commissioner was represented in 1,828 appeals against his decisions at the Refugee Appeals Tribunal in 2010. In 2009 he was represented at 3,190 hearings.