The Green Party is to make a general election promise of a new migration agency to overhaul the State’s approach to managing asylum seekers and people fleeing the Ukraine war.
The manifesto pledge, which will be detailed in the party’s pre-election launch, comes after almost three years of surging migration which has put the State’s existing systems – and party leader Roderic O’Gorman – under unprecedented pressure.
The dedicated agency would take over day-to-day handling of the migration response, as distinct from the current approach which has been run out of Mr O’Gorman’s Department of Integration.
The concept has been discussed at a high level by officials and within Government for months – but the current Coalition has failed to get it off the ground.
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr O’Gorman confirmed that the party will call for a new migration agency to be established in its election manifesto. “The party believes that the current system is in need of reform, with a more co-ordinated, better-resourced approach to migration in Ireland.”
The new body would be called the Asylum and Integration Agency, and would bring together functions currently carried out by the International Protection Office and the International Protection Accommodation Service working alongside the Garda National Immigration Bureau.
There would be input from other departments closely involved in managing the response, as well as local authorities and civil society groups, according to the Greens. It would be responsible for day-to-day processing of applications as well as the procurement and management of accommodation for international protection applicants – which has massively expanded in recent years in response to the crisis.
The Government has a plan to expand the State-owned portfolio of migrant accommodation, but currently has a largereliance on the private sector. It has faced criticism over the absence of a joined-up approach to providing accommodation – with strident pockets of protest against new centres fanned by far-right actors, on occasion leading to clashes with gardaí.
In April, the Cabinet was told that work was beginning to examine the feasibility of establishing a migration accommodation agency, following a scoping exercise undertaken in 2023. The Government believes it will have to deal with between 13,000 and 16,000 asylum seekers coming to Ireland annually, four times what it had planned for in a previous strategy to dismantle the direct provision system.
Ministers have been told that the State will spend €5 billion in the coming decades providing accommodation in State-owned properties – although this would be significantly cheaper than sourcing beds in the private sector.
Meanwhile, the Government may approve the new National Planning Framework when it meets on Tuesday for what is expected to be its last meeting before the general election is called at the end of this week. Senior sources in Fine Gael and the Green Party said they wanted to see the framework – considered necessary for ambitious new housing targets to be set – agreed. Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin told the Sunday Independent that he wanted to see the new framework published.
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