The Secretary of the Department of Justice has apologised for his department's treatment of refugees. Mr Tim Dalton said making over 1,400 refugees queue for hours in the rain outside the Department was a "shameful episode." Speaking to the Dail Committee on Public Accounts, Mr Dalton said the refugees had been asked to come to the Department on successive Saturdays in October.
The Department wanted to find out the number of refugees in the country and how many were entitled to claim welfare payments, he said. The refugees had been asked to come to the Department's offices in St Stephen's Green in Dublin because the records concerning them were kept there.
Mr Dalton said it was regrettable that men, women and children had been left standing outside in the rain. He promised that the episode would not be repeated and in future another way of dealing with the matter would be found.
He said most people seeking refugee status were illegal immigrants. Many of them were people who had travelled from the United Kingdom to apply for refugee status here. This abuse of the system was damaging to people who were genuine refugees.
He said the law did not allow the Department to treat economic migrants as refugees. If Ireland were to deal with economic migrants differently from other European countries, we would have not thousands, but tens and hundreds of thousands of people arriving here. It would be in no one's interest to allow the haphazard arrival of large number of migrants into this country.
He said it was reasonable for people in fear of persecution in their own countries to get welfare when they came to Ireland, but it was less than reasonable in the case of people who had worked or lived for years in the UK.
An amnesty for the 4,500 asylum-seekers living in the State is being considered by a Cabinet sub-commitee, according to Government sources.
The question of a once-off amnesty is only one of the solutions being contemplated by the Government.