The crisis which closed the Department of Justice refugee applications centre and left many asylum-seekers in Dublin homeless for a time last year could have been averted if the Department had heeded official warnings of a shortage of accommodation.
Eighteen months before it made any serious moves to disperse asylum-seekers from the capital, the Department had been warned that the accommodation situation for asylum-seekers was in crisis, according to documents seen by The Irish Times.
The Eastern Health Board told the Department in March 1998 that asylum-seekers "might have no option but to sleep rough" unless action was taken, the note of an interdepartmental meeting of officials records.
This is precisely what happened last autumn, when a surge in the number of people applying for asylum swamped the available reserves of emergency housing in Dublin.
Long queues formed at the refugee applications centre and hundreds of asylum-seekers were turned away because there was nowhere to house them.
Before the March 1998 meeting, Dublin Corporation had written to the Department suggesting dispersal as a possible solution to the accommodation problem. The meeting, which was attended by representatives of six Government departments, the corporation, the gardai and the Eastern Health Board, heard that the health board had for the first time been unable to provide accommodation for all applicants.
A board official predicted this situation was likely to recur in the near future, according to the minutes of the meeting, which were obtained by The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act.
Staff were spending a "disproportionate" amount of time trying to find accommodation, he said.
The EHB's warning came at a time when the number of asylum-seekers was a fraction of what it later became. At the time, the board was dealing with 150 cases a week; by late 1999, about 1,000 people were registering for asylum each month. It was only in October 1999 that the Cabinet approved a plan to disperse asylum-seekers. Mr O'Donoghue's Department placed newspaper advertisements seeking accommodation outside Dublin and wrote to local authorities and health boards seeking their co-operation.
However, the documents also reveal considerable resistance in some areas to the dispersal of asylum-seekers.
The Southern Health Board refused to take on the job of finding accommodation for asylum-seekers, saying this was the task of local authorities.
It described arrangements in Dublin, where the EHB was responsible for this service, as "unsatisfactory" and said this should not be replicated with the SHB.
As far as the board was concerned, its services to asylum-seekers were confined to health provision and the payment of supplementary welfare allowance.
