Since last July, when the Minister for Justice announced a relaxation of the prohibition on asylum-seekers working, just 42 have applied for work permits. Of these 15 have been granted to date. This has been taken, in some quarters, as evidence that most asylum-seekers do not want to work, but the reality is a little more complicated.

The regulations are restrictive, and the onus is placed on employers to prove that no Irish person or EU national was available to do the job for which he or she, on behalf of the asylum-seeker, is seeking a permit - a daunting prospect for many employers.

Indeed, this was so off-putting that the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment recently relaxed some of the regulations, and employers are no longer required, in all cases where they are proposing to employ an asylum-seeker, to produce documentary evidence of prior efforts to recruit Irish nationals.

The number eligible to apply is also greatly reduced by the conditions spelled out in the Minister's order.

To apply for a work permit, an asylum-seeker must have been in the State and have applied for asylum, before last July 26th.

Therefore nobody who arrived after that date, or who will arrive in the future, will be able to apply under these regulations. This excludes more than 2,000 who have arrived since August 1999.

The application for asylum must be made a year before that for a work permit. Therefore, those who have applied for asylum within the past year are not eligible, which excludes about 6,000, including those who will never become eligible.

Of those who have applied for asylum over a year ago, between 6 per cent and 8 per cent had their application granted in the first instance.

Of those whose initial application was rejected, 75 per cent appealed, and of those about 30 per cent had their appeals upheld. This means that approximately one-third of all applications for asylum are successful.

Those who have their appeals turned down are given 15 days to provide reasons, on humanitarian grounds, why they should not be deported. They are no longer in the asylum division of the Department, but the immigration division, so are not eligible to seek work permits.

This means that the proportion of asylum-seekers actually eligible to work is quite small. When added to the difficulties associated with the process, it is hardly surprising that there has been no stampede.

This is unlikely to be a cause of great sorrow to the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, which has always been opposed to allowing asylum-seekers to work.

Its officials fear that offering economic incentives of any kind to asylum-seekers would encourage traffickers to target Ireland and promote illegal immigration into the State.

This is part of the thinking behind its recent decision to replace cash benefits with "direct provision" of food, clothing and accommodation.

The Department has therefore resisted demands from employers organisations, trade unions and opposition politicians for more flexibility in allowing asylum-seekers to work. "The asylum process should not be a labour market policy," a spokesman said.

The fact that at least a third of all asylum-seekers are found to meet the strict criteria for refugee status, and a further number is allowed stay in the State "on humanitarian grounds" - usually meaning that they need international protection - gives lie to the claim from some quarters that Ireland is awash with "bogus" asylum-seekers.

However, it is also true that two of the three countries providing the highest number of asylum-seekers, Romania and Poland, are candidates for accession to the EU. Either their human rights record should render them ineligible for membership, or at least some of these applicants are seeking entry for primarily economic reasons.

FEW people could disagree with the Department that the asylum process is not a suitable mechanism for allowing non-EU nationals to enter the State to work. This raises quite a separate issue - the lack of a proper policy on immigration, and it is this question which should now be addressed.

About 5,000 work permits are is sued annually to non-EU nationals following an application from an employer. The largest group comprises US nationals working in the IT sector. Another significant group would be those working in the ethnic section of the catering industry.

However, it is hard to see how, for example, a shop or cafe needing waiting or serving staff would advertise in, say, Poland or Romania, arrange interviews there, and then apply for a work permit for the chosen applicant.

Yet that is the only way at the moment that an employer can legally take on somebody from outside the EU. There is no way that somebody from one of the former Eastern bloc countries, Africa or indeed the US, can enter the State and seek work without breaking the law.

Mr O'Donoghue did indicate, during the debate on the Immigration Bill, that he favoured some kind of quota system to allow legal immigration into the State. However, a spokesman for the Department of Justice stressed that this was a matter for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

A spokesman for that Department referred The Irish Times to the Department of Foreign Affairs, which referred us back to the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

There are various options this Department might consider when it comes to do so. One would be to extend the existing employment rights of EU citizens to those of countries applying to join, like Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic.

Another would be to streamline access to work permits from countries whose citizens do not require a visa to enter this State, including the US, Canada, Mexico and South Africa. There are other options including people from other African countries and Asia.

The advantages of introducing a simple procedure for legal immigration into the State are many, not least for asylum-seekers. It would mean that those who want to come here for economic reasons could apply to do so without having to try to satisfy the criteria for asylum, and face deportation when they failed.

This would mean an end to the stigmatisation of asylum-seekers as "bogus", and ease the pressure on the asylum system, and it could go a long way towards filling those vacancies advertised in shop windows.