REFUGEES to this State include many who have been tortured and need specialist treatment, a seminar in Dublin has heard.

While no figures are available for Ireland, statistics from Denmark suggest that of their refugee population, 55 per cent of men and 12 per cent of women have been tortured, psychologist, Ms Rosemary Troy, said yesterday.

She is one of a group of people who organised the seminar to get support for a treatment centre for refugees in Ireland.

Ms Troy said refugees often hid, that they had been tortured. This could be through shame or mistrust of officials who, in their own country, might have been corrupt and abusive.

"They need a multiplicity of services in the area of physical health, dental, physiotherapy and psychological needs," she said.

"Current knowledge tells us that torture is generally carried out not for the purpose of extracting information, because the torture continues after the extraction of information and this information, will often already be in the hands of the torturers, but it is done solely to destroy the individual and to use the broken person to spread terror," she said.

"The targets for torture are often community leaders such as student leaders, human rights activists, trade unionists. The aim is seldom to inflict death but rather to instil fear and terror."

Torture had "now acquired something like the status of a science with techniques becoming universal because they are shared by torturers around the world".