A system of direct provision for the needs of asylum-seekers was likely to be "inhumane, discriminatory and economically unsound", the Joint Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs has been told.
Ms Cathryn Costello, a lecturer in European Law in Trinity College and executive member of the Irish Refugee Council, said proposals announced on Tuesday were so far very short on detail.
A voucher system, for example, or the direct provision of food and clothing, restricted the choice of goods and services for asylum-seekers and treated them differently from other social-welfare recipients.
"In the absence of justification they amount to discrimination," she said, adding that in other states, it had been found that such schemes were more expensive to run than normal social welfare provision, and were unnecessarily bureaucratic.
Referring to the Department's proposal to disperse asylum-seekers throughout the State, she said the IRC accepted this in principle, but the facilities had to be put in place outside Dublin before there was any dispersal.
The experience in Ennis, for example, where such facilities were in place, showed that dispersal could work very well. It was also essential that any dispersal should be voluntary, sensitively carried out and kept family groups together. The experience with the Kosovan refugees showed what the best practice could be.
Mr Bernard Durkan TD, chairman of the committee, said there were two issues, the need for an immigration policy and the need for an asylum policy.
"The odd thing is that we have people in this country, in the border area between asylum-seekers and economic refugees, who are available and qualified to work and cannot. It is timely we consider this.
"We are not in the same situation as we were 10 years ago, or even five years ago. There is no better way to create antipathy to asylum-seekers than by refusing them permission to work."
Senator Brendan Ryan asked what difference it would make if the rules against asylum-seekers working were significantly loosened up.
Ms Costello said there was a false notion that reception conditions in a country - the conditions under which asylum-seekers lived while waiting for a decision - determined the flow of asylum-seekers.
This was determined by other factors.
Mr Ned Lawton, a researcher with the Irish Refugee Council, said the right to apply for a work permit was restricted to those who had arrived in Ireland and applied for asylum before July 26th last, and who were waiting for a decision for at least a year. This was quite a restricted group.
The Oireachtas committee meeting was called to discuss the conclusions of the European Council meeting in Tampere last week. Mr Ned Lawton said the council generally welcomed the conclusions on a common EU asylum and migration policy.
These should be harmonised along the lines of the Irish interpretation of the Geneva Convention, which was a very liberal one, he said.
"The Dublin Convention can only make sense if all the states have the same definitions of refugee and similar procedures," he said.
The Dublin Convention provides for asylum-seekers to be sent from one EU country to another if they had landed there first.
Mr Lawton pointed out that France and Germany, unlike Ireland, did not recognise as refugees those suffering persecution from non-state agencies. They would not have recognised people from East Timor who were being attacked by armed pro-Indonesian militias as entitled to asylum, while Ireland would.