Gavan Reilly: Helen’s hellish week is mostly of McEntee’s own making

Not to go all Gwyneth Paltrow, but there always comes a time in the life of a coalition when the conscious uncoupling begins. The fight that Lisa Chambers is currently picking a fight with the Greens - including a senator who is part of her government grouping in the Seanad - is part of it.

So too are the comments from Micheál Martin in London on Monday, when he wrote off Helen McEntee’s claims about cross-border asylum transit as not being based on statistics or data.

The first thing to say upfront is: he’s right. Several TDs and media outlets have been asking questions for months about the travel patterns of those seeking international protection. A percentage of applicants were lodging claims upon arrival at Dublin Airport; others were claiming at sea ports; the vast majority were showing up at the IPAS offices, implying they had arrived here through ‘regular’ means.

It was for this reason that Helen McEntee’s claims last week, that over 80% of applicants were coming from across the border, raised so many eyebrows. Why were the Department – and the Minister – suddenly so confident, when it had never given such an inkling before?

There are a few other things to make clear. The Minister is not directly responsible for how many asylum seekers show up in Ireland asking for international protection (nor, as it happens, for their accommodation). She is not responsible for the High Court last month striking down the law which labels the UK as a safe country, thus temporarily impeding the return of asylum seekers coming from the North. She is not responsible for the domestic politics of the UK being as they are, the timing of local elections in England, or the decision of her British counterpart to pull out of a scheduled meeting at short notice.

(While we’re at it: any kind of threat to somebody’s home, whether a high-ranking powerful minister or a mere civilian, is abhorrent and unacceptable. The threats to McEntee’s home last week are completely beyond the pale; even the most staunch critic of the government will rightly condemn them.)

What McEntee is responsible for, however, is the running of her Department and being on top of her brief. On that she now has a serious problem – so serious that senior figures in her own coalition are publicly casting aspersions on her testimony.

Her appearance before the Dáil committee last Tuesday, ostensibly to discuss the EU Migration & Asylum Pact and why Ireland should ratify it, started out okay. The answers were not terribly compelling (Q: ‘Why not cherry pick the bits we want?’ A: ‘In that case wouldn’t we just join up properly?’) but plausible on balance: the existing system has inefficiencies, and unless we join in this attempt to update them, we will be seen as a soft touch.

It was natural to expect conversation to turn to the phenomenon of asylum seekers applying in multiple jurisdictions. The existing EU system intends for applicants who cross borders to be returned to the original country of application. In practice this doesn’t always work out: the first country often doesn’t agree to accept them, so a replacement pact is needed.

Given Ireland’s apparent grievances that some countries won’t agree to take back their original applicants, you’d expect the Department to be rigorous in the few instances where they do. Yet, that’s where McEntee came unstuck.

Moreover, she should have seen the questions coming from Michael McNamara, given he has been putting in written questions on this topic for months. McEntee told him in writing in February that Ireland had executed just three ‘transfer decisions’ in 2023. In April, on foot of further questions, McEntee told him there had been 188 such decisions reached.

A side note is important here. All written answers to parliamentary questions are issued in the name of the minister - but not all ministers choose to supervise the answers that are released in their names. Some make an explicit point of doing so: civil servants will often draft a reply that reveals an unpalatable truth. Others do it, or get their advisors to do so, simply to keep on top of the things the minister is “saying”. Evidently, neither McEntee nor her advisors have been doing so. (Incidentally, her outgoing press advisor retired last week; the replacement started on Monday. Not exactly an easy start…)

Had they done so, they might have known to expect the line of questioning. If 188 transfer agreements were reached, why had only three been executed?

This proves the inefficiency of the Dublin III system… No, in these circumstances the other country has agreed to take them back.

We can only issue a take-back request… These are agreements, not requests.

They weren’t done within the six-month timeframe… Why would the Department allow the clock run out?

If the other country frustrates… But the other country hasn’t.

McNamara had a follow-up question: if the biggest backlog in asylum processing is the numbers who have been rejected, and made one final appeal directly to the minister, how many of those are pending? Neither she, nor anyone else, had an answer.

In the grand national scheme of things, 188 people isn’t a huge number. It’s less than one per cent of the overall number of applicants this year. Moving that number won’t make or break the accommodation crisis facing the State, or the tented village on Mount St.

But the failure of the Department to act as it can; McEntee’s apparent ignorance of this; and the failure to pause and ask officials for guidance (as is often done in Oireachtas committees, without fanfare or scandal) – instead trying to pivot the question so that it’s someone else’s fault – is damaging.

It’s not helpful that the Tories are in election mode and Rishi Sunak is refusing to countenance a ‘deal’ to return refugees that already exists. But there’s no immediate electoral reason for Micheál Martin to start publicly undermining the comments of his own Cabinet colleagues. It’s not likely to get better any time soon.