 Ond i'w ffordd llawer, Cyhoeddwch chi ddigon i'w ddweud eich cyfnodeil mewn arddangos cerddiol hefyd ar yr Eurloedd mewn serthweithio arall, ac rwy'n rhoi eraill y llunio mewn yr Eurloedd, yn unrhyw hwnnw, ac allan o'r unrhyw unio yn nifer o'r unrhyw unrhyw rwyf hwnnw. Rwy'n rhoi'n rhoi'n rhoi arno'r unrhyw fyrnodaeth ar y system Eurloedd, ac mae'n rhoi ei ddefnyddio'r unrhyw sylwodol eirloedd. My office was established in 2000. It deals with what's known as international protection applications, and I'll explain what they are in a minute, but we have about 100 full-time staff, but we also have about 50 to 60 lawyers who work with us as well who help us to process the cases. We work in teams, so we have teams of, say, three or four lawyers led by civil servants because the final decisions have to be signed by civil servants, but the lawyers do the interviews and they write the reports. The reports are actually legally vetted reports because they have to comply with the law and all our decisions are appealable to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, which is a quasi-judicial body. They can also end up as judicial review before the High Court, and anyone who's familiar with refugee law will know that it's a substantial jurisprudence in this area compared with 10 years ago when there wasn't a lot of cases. Certainly 15 years ago now there's a substantial body of law about my office, about the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, and about the immigration asylum system generally. In addition, we also process applications for family reunification, so when someone gets refugee status in Ireland, they're entitled to apply to bring their family or certain members of their family to Ireland, and we process those cases. The final decisions are made by the Department of Justice, but we actually will do the analysis, do the background research and effectively give a recommendation. In fact, all our decisions are in fact recommendations because at the end of the day the Ministry of Justice makes the final decision, but in most cases it's basically a rubber stamping job because we would have all the researchers, we would do all the interviews, and the Minister basically just signs them in a small unit in the department. It wouldn't have the resources to revisit the whole thing because that would actually be ineffective. We also input into developments at EU level in Brussels, there is an asylum working party, and all of the EU proposals for a form of asylum is a substantial amount of them going through council at any one time, we would send officials along with the department. We also represent Ireland at the European Asylum Support Office, which is a practical co-operation office recognised by EU law, and again I'll talk about that. I'm deputy chairperson, the chair of that is an Austrian, he's head of the asylum office in Vienna. I'm deputy chair and then we have a management board comprising all of the EU states, the European Commission and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We meet three or four times a year to look at the overall system of asylum in Europe from an operation perspective and operational and practical co-operation between states. What is protection? For us in Ireland there are two forms of protection, international protection. There is protection as a refugee and protection for what's known as subsidiary protection, which is very much based on EU law. Refugee status is based on the United Nations Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees. The subsidiary protection regime, which I'll tell you about in a minute, is based very much on EU law. What is an asylum seeker? What is a refugee? An asylum seeker is really an applicant for asylum, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to get asylum because they have to satisfy the criteria. So the criteria is very much a person owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion is outside their country of origin, arrive in Ireland and apply for protection. And after interviews, assessments of country of origin information, in other words, can their story they're telling us stand up and an analysis of the claim, we decide are they going to comply with that definition of a refugee. As a asylum seeker, you're an applicant. As a refugee, you're the person who actually gets the status. That's a simple definition, but it's actually a little bit more complex than that, but in general terms that's what it is. Then we also have what's known as subsidiary protection and that's really, if you're not eligible for refugee status, you can satisfy what's known as a serious harm test, which is defined as, for example, the debt penalty, torture and human or degrading treatment in your country of origin. And if you satisfy that test, in other words, if you have a real risk of suffering serious harm and it's under EU law, you can also qualify for what's known as subsidiary protection. And it's a different term to persecution, but effectively the actual outcomes are the same. You're entitled to stay in Ireland, you're entitled to work, you're entitled to study. Eventually, if you're so many years in the country, you could qualify for higher citizenship and you're entitled to family reunification. So even though it's a different form of protection, the rights, obligations, benefits flowing from it are fairly much the same. Our protection system is very much, as I said, the circle there in the middle and flowing into that is EU law, domestic law and international law. Now, obviously, primarily for us, it's domestic law, but our legislation has to be compatible with EU law. And also, it's very much based on international law. In particular, I'm talking about the 1951 Geneva Convention, and it does a protocol of 1967, and that effectively sets out the definition of who is a refugee, which I already showed you. So Irish Law, the Refugee Act 1996, imports the key principles from that international convention. But we are also importing the EU regulations and directives. There's a body of EU law, which I'll mention in the second dealing with asylum. It goes back, you know, it goes back certainly to around 2000, 1999, 2000, when it started to be developed. And it's been through a number of various stages. We started off with minimum standards and now there's common standards. And all of those regulations and directives, the directives in particular, our legislation has to be compatible with them. So when we bring in new law, we have to make sure it complies with EU law. And, you know, our Refugee Act, which has been amended many times, which we're using at the moment for the purpose of our processing, we're going to replace that hopefully by the end of this year by what's known as an International Protection Act. So we're in the process at the moment of undergoing substantial reform in the Irish protection process. Moving from a multi-state process, which I'll say something about in a second, to a much more consolidated single procedure. So that's the framework on which we operate. And the institutions, the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner, I look at cases at first instance, which basically means the initial application for asylum and for subsidy protection. And then the applicants who don't get status with me are entitled to appeals that are refugee appeals tribunal. And then the final decision, particularly in relation to deportations and there's another form of humanitarian permission which you can get is made by the Minister for Justice. So that's effectively, it's a multi-layered process. And some would argue that it has given a rise to a lot of inefficiencies. And you'll see later that I'm going to tell you about what we've been doing to deal with that and reform our process. And those reforms we're planning to bring in at the end of the year. So in terms of application numbers, you can see there's always been sort of an up and a down. I mean, the highest numbers over the years have been around 2002 when we had 11,000 applicants. Now you might say, well, compared with 100,000 or 50,000, not a lot, but it has been a lot for the institutions that were there. So substantial resources had to be put into them around 2002-2003. And then the numbers began to fall and they began to rise again last year up to 3,200. These are refugee status applications. So you can see for 2015 we 3,276 applicants and they're the main countries, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Albania, Nigeria, India. And then for this year, up to July, the numbers are running lower than last year. We expect to have about 2,000 applicants this year and they're coming from Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Albania, Afghanistan. So, you know, the composition, you know, changes, but, you know, certain countries, for example, Pakistan, Nigeria, you know, would figure large over the years. And Nigeria in particular has been an applicant's substantial numbers of applicants over the years from Nigeria. And then if you compare that with what's going on generally in the world, I had one of my colleagues do some research today. And you can see, so in 2015 Ireland had 3,000 applications, but in the EU there was 1 million, 1.3 million international protection applications. And in 2016 to date, the 632 applications for international protection, 632,000 in the European Union. But again, the key countries are Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and they haven't really changed last year to this year. But we don't, we see some of those countries, but we don't get a lot of Syrian applicants coming directly to Ireland. We take Syrians to the EU education programme, which I'll talk to you about in a second. So it just gives you an example of what the Irish protection process is about. We've structures, we've legislation and we've got a flow of applicants. And it's their job basically when the people come to us to take the application to register them, to give them a card, which is basically like, it's not an identity card, but it's very like an IT card, a photograph is on it. And they're also fingerprinted and they're registered. And then after about so many weeks they're given their first interview. And you know, it's an interview which you can go on for two to three hours. And a lot of them are, a lot of the applicants are supported by lawyers. We're a lot of research. Then the interviewer who is always a lawyer at the, trained in this area, trained by the United Nations High Commission of Refugees will then research the case. Look at the representations that have been made. Why do you want to be recognised as a refugee? We'll research the case against country of origin information, which might be supplied by the United Nations High Commission of Refugees, which might be supplied by the UK Home Office, which might be supplied by the Canadian asylum refugee board. We input into a lot of sources, Amnesty International. And we use primarily for our research, we have a small research department that says, but we use primarily the refugee documentation centre, which is attached to the legal aid board. They have permanent researchers there and they have IT systems, some of which are supported by the European asylum office, which try and get the up-to-date research. What is happening in Syria? What is happening in Nigeria? What is happening in Pakistan? And if whatever story is told to us, we try and assess that against the country of origin information. This information can be quite detailed. For example, if someone says they were through a particular incident in a particular part of a country, you can actually home in now on that part of a country. You can actually use Google Maps to go down into the street they talk about. And if they say you could ask questions about what school did you go to, what religion are you, tell us something about the religion, tell us something about the area you're from, tell us something about the persecution. And you can literally, it's like going in on a microscope, you can actually zoom in right into the area and you can use examples of similar cases from other countries through networks we have. And you can come up with an assessment of whether there is a reasonable case that there should be granted refugee status. We don't always get it right, but the quality of decisions are proved by the United Nations and in general because we put in a lot of extra work over the years to improve the quality of decisions, to bring in trained lawyers, to use quality research in general to feedback from the United Nations for the work we do is very positive, glad to say. It wasn't always like that. We were subject to a lot of criticism over the years, but things have improved. Our recognition rates are around for refugee status about 16%, but they're much higher for subsidiary protection. So your subsidiary protection could be over 20%. So it depends on the story you tell. You could either qualify as a refugee or you could qualify for subsidiary protection. So briefly, the common EU asylum policy, as I said, is one of the influences on what we do. That's a series of regulations and directives agreed at European Union level since 2000, but there have been revisions of them and they're dealing with procedures for protection. So what is the application procedure? What quality interview do you have to do? What type of analysis do you have to apply? What procedures do you have to apply for determining who is entitled to international protection? So that's set out in an EU directive. So we have to import that into our national law. So the logic behind it is to try and ensure a consistency of approach across the European Union. Now, that isn't actually being achieved, which is one of the reasons the European asylum office was set up, but it's the logic behind it. Similarly, the eligibility criteria. What are the criteria must satisfy to get international protection? That's in a directive. There are minimum standards for reception conditions. So what quality accommodation must you provide? Do you have to employ, allow asylum seekers to work? What minimum levels of health care? What minimum levels of education access to social systems? They are covered to some extent by the reception conditions directive. Then a critical directive, which I'm sure even if you're not working in this area, you've heard of what's known as the Dublin regulation. That receives a lot of publicity and that is a regulation that's on its third version at the moment and the fourth one being discussed at EU level. It's all about what country in the European Union is the country that processes your application. So just because you come to Ireland, it doesn't necessarily mean Ireland will process your application. It's normally based on the first country in which you make your asylum application, but there's a lot of other criteria. For example, if you have family members in another country, it might be in your interest to be reunited with them and have your application process in that country, but it's primarily what country you apply in first. So when applicants come in to us, we take their fingerprints, that's compared with what's known as the Euro DAC fingerprinting system, which is a central EU system, and that will tell you if you've applied for asylum in another country. Then we have to go to that country through a formal IT network we have and a decision is made which country processes the application. So you don't necessarily get process in the country you come to and that's based on the Euro DAC system. It's not just fingerprint, it's whether you've had visas issued by other countries, whether you have residence permits issued by other countries. So in my office there is a section of I think 12 people dealing with these cases. They told me last week that at least 500 decisions have been made this year that Ireland is not the country to process applications. So there's a lot of two-ing and fro-ing between EU states. Because we wanted to achieve a common approach, operational approach, common standards, the European Union decided to set up in 2010 a European Asylum Support Office. That's an executive agency of the European Union. It's based in Malta and its role is basically to try through operation cooperation to try and ensure common standards in relation to training, in relation to country of origin research, in relation to best practice on quality, what quality should your decision be. The logic behind it was that there has been a lot of criticism internationally, particularly on the part of NGOs. We're also in the heart of states that if, for example, you're in Afghanistan and you come to Ireland, or if you're the same Afghan and you go to Sweden, you might necessarily get the same decision. The idea behind the European Asylum Policy is that the outcomes should reasonably be the same. Because that wasn't happening and because the possibility of practical cooperation at EU level was very limited before 2010, because officials were mainly dealing with writing legislation and meeting and working groups discussing legislation. There was no real discussions on cooperation. The Asylum Office was set up, it has about 100 staff, and it has processes to work on qualities, common training programmes, common country of origin research. These standards were officials from each of the countries meet and they produced best practice guides. There is a new proposal out in the last six months to turn the office into a European agency with much stronger powers. As a huge debate going on in Europe at the moment about how strong should that office be compared with limited practical cooperation, should it have enforcement powers, should it eventually be able to have, should it be a central processing office in the European Union to process all the claims, maybe with branch offices in various countries. All that debate is going on at the moment. It also provides emergency support for countries like Greece and Italy whose systems have the under substantial pressure over the last few years. The European Asylum Office provides practical support. So it goes to countries like Ireland, UK, France, Sweden and if the Greeks need, for example in the Dublin Regulation Unit assistance with building up their governance arrangements, the operation of those units, they would come to Ireland, they would go to the UK, they would go to Sweden to say have you got two experts or four experts that we could send to Greece for three weeks to try and enhance the ability of them to do their job in that area. And that's been going on all the time. Experts are moving between states, helping other states out. It also looks at information analysis and it provides, it's moving into the whole area of support for third countries, non-EU states, so we're providing support in Africa in particular to countries who have very mediocre asylum processes that just don't have the capacity. So the European Asylum Office, true various EU aid programmes, provides experts to help them build their systems. So the European migration crisis, there's been a major crisis in Europe in, I'm talking about refugees and asylum seekers, that's what I'm here to talk about, but there has been a major migration crisis. And in particular 2015, 2016, where at particular times of the year there have been major flows of people into the European Union. Now the flows in particular are coming, or we're coming to Greece and now you see the publicities are coming mainly to Italy. And those people are coming in some cases from serious areas of conflict, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, in the case of Italy, Eritrea, there's a serious human rights situation in Eritrea, Somalia, there's major governance issues there, Sudan, there's a difference in between South and North Sudan, you may be aware. So those countries are fleeing, or those people are fleeing their countries of origin, they're making their way with the assistance in many cases of traffickers or people to whom they pay money, and they're coming in the case of the African states over the desert areas into Libya in particular, and they're making their way then by boat to Italy. Now the boats possibly don't get that far, some of them sink, but in other cases there are navies working together as an Irish naval vessel there at the moment, there has been for some time who obviously carry out rescues. Now those people are then brought to Italy, they were brought to Malta, but a lot of them are brought to Italy, and in the case of Greece they were travelling by boats, run by traffickers from Turkey into Greece, and when they arrived in these countries there really wasn't the capacity there to actually help them. And you can see the numbers, 2015, 857,000, Italy 153,000, these are the 2016 figures, 160,000 for Greece, 70,000 for Italy, but that's to the end of June, these numbers have grown particularly for Italy over the summer months, I don't have the up-to-date statistics but the latest statistics we have are there. The Greek numbers, so basically what happens when they come? I mean there was chaos, the Italians and the Greek authorities just couldn't cope. So the European Union decided to bring in what was known as a relocation programme, which Ireland is taking part in and it's based on two council decisions and there's also an agreement with Turkey. And those programmes particularly to relocation programmes are geared towards inviting people who are in Greece and Italy to apply for relocation to other EU states. Now there is a formula, everyone wouldn't be in type to relocation, it's really only groups from nationalities where there's in general a 75% more or more grant rate, so if you are 75%, from a group that's 75% likely to get asylum in an EU country and you're talking about countries like Syria, countries like Eritrea but the list changes, you can qualify for what's known as relocation. And what that means is that you're invited to apply, you are registered and then eventually you are processed and you're brought over to other EU states that will process your asylum application. So it's an attempt to take the pressure off the Italian and the Greek systems but at the same time to ensure that there is a fair process put forward in order to ensure that the people who need protection get it. Now Ireland has been working in this programme for some time now and we've had people over in the Greek islands, we've also had them in Italy but mainly on the Greek islands basically registering people for relocation. We've also, my staff have been over there doing what's known as vulnerability assessments so we actually talked to people who have been through traumatic events in Syria in particular and what we do is we obviously register them for relocation. So they either go into the Greek asylum process first or they're registered for relocation eventually and then they qualify for moving into another EU state. Now some applicants did not qualify because we didn't believe they were asylum seekers at all, they were economic migrants so they wouldn't qualify for the programme and they basically were put into a category which were going to be returned to Turkey. And that's what that agreement was about but in terms of the people coming into the relocation programme they were asylum seekers and their claims would have to be processed. Now the numbers were slow at the start for relocation, the main reason was slow was it was inefficient, it wasn't run properly at the start, people were not being registered, people were not being given information. But the European Asylum Support Office used EU experts including Irish experts, British experts, Swedish, Netherlands, Germans to go out and set up what's known as hotspots. And people were brought to these hotspots given accommodation. The hotspots at the moment are in Greece, on the Greek islands, Lesbos and some of the other islands, they're all registered there. Some of them have their cases processed along the lines I told you but they're registered there and then they're put into what's known as relocation, the relocation programme. We have made pledges in Ireland to take groups of people but so far the numbers coming are quite small but it's ratcheting up as far as I can see. So in terms of Ireland, our numbers have been very, very small but we have set up as known as the Irish Refugee Protection Programme which is a multi-agency programme, there's a programme office in the Department of Justice. And we're starting to get people from the pledges because we put pledges in and the people were indeed unavailable or there were problems with register them but since we slowly started to get staff out there we begin to register more people and they've started to come. So you can see the numbers have arrived so far. Last week there was another 30 came in, we're expecting another group of 60 over the coming weeks. So what happens is my staff goes out, we tell the Greeks we want 60 more people, they send over 60 files, we go through the files, we then go out to Athens and those 60 people are interviewed and they're also given what's known as orientation programmes about what is Ireland about, what is our culture about, what is our history about, just to ensure they understand that the countries are coming to us is different from what they left. And then we have guards out there, a guard of Chicano who carries out security checks. So the numbers are small but other countries are involved as well so that's one of the ways in which pressure is being taken off the European Union, EU, I'm talking about Greece initially in particular because their system couldn't cope, people are being put into the programmes. Now it's more effective for Greece because they have a much more comprehensive support programme in place now. It's more difficult with regard to Italy, it's a much slower process for the Italians to get numbers into the relocation process but certainly for Greece it's working quite well. So many of you, that's what it's about. So in terms of the challenge for protection in the EU, the relocation programme has been the European Union's response to the pressures that are being put on Greece initially. It's a sharing of the burden, a sharing of asylum seekers which is to ensure that everyone gets an interview and everyone gets a decision and everyone gets a determination. Now all of the applicants that have come to Ireland have had their decisions apart from the Turkey that came last week and they get their decisions certainly within a number of months and they've all been granted refugee status because they've all been Syrians. So we haven't really done comprehensive interviews, we've done very light touch interviews because once we know they're from Syria well we really assess them to be eligible for refugee status. So that's really our response to that. Now what are the challenges? The challenges for my office over the next year or so and for Ireland in particular is that there's a new single procedure, a new international protection act coming in at the end of the year. And that's going to repeal all the existing law that I've spoken to you about for Ireland and we're basically going to move from a multi-stage process whereby my office did some protection decisions, the minister did some more to a situation where everything is done by means of what's known as a single procedure. So any ground you have for refugee status, subsidy protection and any other reasons you want to stay in the state we will process all them together as part of one process. At the moment they're processed at different stages which is a very long drawn out process so we're the only country that doesn't have a single procedure in the European Union at the moment. And we're also establishing an international protection office so the refugee application commissioner's office is being abolished but it's being turned into what's known as an international protection office which will bring all the legislation together that we have at the moment into one act and process them as part of a single procedure. Then you can appeal to the international protection appeals tribunal which is a new tribunal being set up at the end of the year to replace the refugee appeals tribunal and if you don't get refugee status or subsidy protection from my office you can appeal to the international protection appeals tribunal which is entitled to give you status as well. And the whole process is streamlined, it's more efficient use of resources, it should lead to speedier decisions provided we get the resources and it gives applicants clarity with their status because the problem with the Irish protection process over the years has been a very slow process. Even though first instance which is my office might work speedily at times there could be delays in the tribunal or if you leave the tribunal and you go to the minister to deal with the final leg of the process which is what's known as humanitarian need to remain you could be waiting for years. You could be in the process for years, people are stuck in direct provision accommodation which is basically state provider accommodation, they've no rights, they've limited entitlements and the view was that it's a much fairer process if it could be streamlined so that's the answer to what the problems are and the challenges are. So maybe in a year's time we'll let you know if we ever come back here again how we're getting on. The other big challenge is reforms in EU law at the moment as I said there's a substantial number of directives and regulations dealing with asylum but there are new versions of them out at the moment and they are being discussed. Most of them are on rev tree at the moment so it's basically the third go at a regulation or a directive in the case of Dublin, the Dublin regulation we're on rev four so it's based on practice experience what works, what hasn't worked, new ideas come out from the European Commission and the Member States meet in the working parties and eventually in council now it's a process that will go on for a number of years but so the next year or so we'll see a big priority on reforms of EU law and that will then influence our domestic law so wherever comes out when we decide to participate again it means more amendments to domestic law. And the final challenge we have is very much about relocation, rationing up the programmes, assisting Greece initially that are under pressure, Italy more at the moment and bringing people over to Ireland in greater numbers to have their applications processed here. I sort of gave you an overview that's the best I can do in the time available. Thank you very much.