Gavan Reilly: It’s one thing to set rules, another to enforce them

It’s been funny to see the apparent claim given to Jim O’Callaghan in the last few days, after the new Minister for Justice gave a series of interviews including some ‘home truths’ on immigration.

The latter is especially hard to square. The minister said at the weekend, for example, that the majority of international protection applicants are not entitled to be here. Well, duh: that’s not a brave statement, it’s a description of facts. The majority (not an overwhelming majority, but the majority) of applicants have their requests for asylum turned down. By definition, therefore, they do not meet the criteria for being allowed to stay. It’s not rocket science - yet merely saying it aloud apparently means he’s being feted as a heroic soothsayer who is finally ‘calling things out’.

An objectively more important task is whether the existing rules around asylum seekers are actually being enforced. The man who died after the stabbings on South Anne Street had previously failed in a request for asylum in Italy, where he had also been also arrested and accused of rape.

Here’s the thing. We are told that claimants in Ireland are fingerprinted and are checked against Europol records for suggestions of previous crime: while the late man is entitled to the presumption of innocence, why was he permitted to claim asylum in a second EU country, and not have this previous allegation come back to light?

Elsewhere the official guidance also says if an asylum seeker is accused of a serious crime while in Ireland, their application is immediately rejected. Why, then, was the Stoneybatter slasher - whose Irish visa had already expired - allowed out on bail while facing serious drug charges? Why was he released to walk freely around a country he was not entitled to be in?

The easier thing for a new justice minister to do, than to rewrite asylum rules, would be to ensure the existing ones are properly enforced.