Earlier this summer, politicians converged on Farranfore Airport, Co Kerry, to seize photo opportunities with Kosovan refugees fleeing massacre and persecution.
In a public relations feeding frenzy, the great and good of Irish politics came out to be seen in solidarity with exiled Kosovars.
Nobody though went to meet Mifail Ali when he stepped off the ferry at Dun Laogh aire at 6 a.m. on April 3rd, 1996. Mifail had just spent five days travelling through Europe hiding in a truck. He fled Kosovo after his family was subjected to human rights abuses at the hands of Serb police.
Unlike this summer's "programme refugees", Mifail has not received cultural orientation services or psychological services, nor was he free to work until last week's decision on that issue from the Department of Justice. Any right to free education and travel abroad has also been withheld.
As an asylum-seeker living in the State for the past three years, all he could do was wait for justice officials to decide his fate. On May 18th, he finally got his decision: he was denied leave to remain. Mifail had fallen foul of the Dublin Convention which states that asylum-seekers must apply in the first country they arrive in. Because he disembarked from his truck in England, then travelled by ferry from Holyhead to Dublin, he would have to return England and seek asylum there.
Now Mifail faces possible deportation, depending on the outcome of a "test" case on the legality of deportation in the State. "If they send me back to England then I have to start this whole process again. I have to find a new life and I'll lose the friends I've made in Ireland. If I'm sent back to Kosovo, I have nothing," says Mifail.
According to Ms Valerie Hughes, of the Ireland Kosovo Solidarity Group, Mifail is one of several Kosovars who have been caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare which is causing them serious psychological trauma.
"Many of these people have had their families killed in Kosovo and have suffered terribly at the hands of the Serbs. It's simply inhumane to send them back to third countries like England or Germany from where they could be sent back to Kosovo.
"Our generous treatment of programme refugees from Kosovo demonstrates the hypocrisy of our asylum laws. People like Mifail have suffered just as much as any of the programme refugees yet they face deportation."
Mifail Ali's family home in the town of Ferizaj was visited on several occasions by Serb police before he fled.
He says: "The first time the Serb police came to my house they beat my mother on the knees. The second time the special police came and did the same, the third time it was the military police who broke the whole house up and burnt all my father's books."
His father was arrested in 1992 for having censored books and died two years later from repeated beatings from Serbian prison guards. That same year his brother was con scripted into the Serb army. He has not heard from him for more than eight years and believes he must be dead or imprisoned for deserting.
When the military police called at Mifail's home in January 1996 to conscript him, he went into hiding. After the war began in Kosovo earlier this year, he lost contact with his mother and now fears that she was killed.
"I have no home, no father, no mother. I don't have any family to start life in Kosovo again. I want to stay in Ireland; all my friends are here," says Mifail.
In a television interview some months ago, the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, spoke of the State's "international and humanitarian obligations" to take in refugees from Kosovo. Since then the plight of the programme refugees has been well documented, but it seems that asylum-seekers like Mifail have slipped through the net.
"The programme refugees, they are treated well and that's right, but for people who came before the war it is different," says Mifail. "But Kosovars have been in danger before the war and nobody believed us, when I told them [justice officials] we were being killed, people just didn't believe us."
Waiting for the official decision on asylum applications is traumatic for asylum-seekers. For many of the Kosovars in that queue, the last few months have been hard. Families have been killed in Kosovo or displaced to countries across Europe. Without asylum status, people like Mifail cannot travel to meet family in other European countries or - in some cases - are unable to travel back to Kosovo to begin the search for bodies.
"I'm with all the others waiting for years for the Department of Justice to give answers. No one knows what will happen, only God knows," says Mifail.