A total of 723 people have been deported from the State in the past four years on 23 charter flights at a cost of €3,150,000, Minister for Justice Michael McDowell told the Dáil.
Smaller charters were organised for disruptive people, such as one individual who broke an immigration officer's arm while resisting deportation, said the Minister.
Mr McDowell said there was a new EU initiative on sharing the costs of flights. He said that on occasions flights had been chartered and individuals had taken judicial reviews to prevent deportation.
The department was now considering issuing letters that arguments should be made immediately and "eleventh hour" applications for judicial reviews would not be accepted. The Minister told Ciarán Cuffe (Green, Dun Laoghaire) that the State's obligation did not extend to monitoring people or doing a follow-up once they were deported.
Earlier he told Fine Gael spokesman Jim O'Keeffe that a Charles Clarke-situation did not arise in Ireland in relation to the deportation of non-nationals convicted of serious offences.
"There is no smoking gun," he insisted, and he accused Mr O'Keeffe of xenophobia, of "doing a Steve Silvermint" and of "throwing ridiculous shapes", in reference to the sacking of the British home secretary following the release without deportation of a number of non-British nationals after they had served prison sentences for serious offences including rape and murder.
Mr O'Keeffe, who emphatically rejected the allegations of xenophobia, in turn accused the Minister of "hiding the facts and putting up a smokescreen pretending the facts are not available".
The Fine Gael TD said he had asked parliamentary questions twice about this issue but got no information. The Minister said that 113 non-EU prisoners were serving sentences in Ireland, from 38 countries. Mr O'Keeffe said he was interested in the ones for whom deportation had not been considered.
He said that since 1999 only four such offenders had been deported, and the proper liaisons had only been put in place at the time of the British controversy.
Mr McDowell insisted that it was a radically differently situation because in Britain the judiciary could deport people sent to prison.
