Sir, – Your report on payments to asylum seekers once again highlights the mismanagement by the Government of the asylum system (“Daily expenses payments to 5,000 asylum seekers now stopped”, News July 30th).
It now seems that for many years thousands of asylum seekers who have been granted leave to remain in this country have continued to live in State-provided accommodation but have not been subject to the same means assessments as other Irish citizens in relation to their social welfare payments.
This despite the fact that the majority of these people have been working as well as being entitled to claim all of their social welfare entitlements.
It beggars belief that on top of this, payments under the direct provision system appear to have continued regardless of the enhanced economic circumstances of the recipients, at a huge and unnecessary cost to the Irish taxpayer.
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The Minister for Social Protection has explained this oversight on the basis that “a lot of things were happening in social protection” over recent years but not so much, one assumes, to have exempted the rest of the population from these checks and balances as required under law.
There has been much recent debate in relation to the “pull factors” and policy errors which have contributed to the huge increase in asylum applications and the resultant pressure on asylum accommodation.
This latest example of maladministration can only add to that concern which has been highlighted last week by the European Union Agency for Asylum, which has reported that Ireland has now overtaken Cyprus as the country with the highest number of asylum seekers per capita of the population. – Yours, etc,
MARTIN McDONALD,
Terenure,
Dublin 12.