Mr. Brian Killoran:

I echo what Sr. Keenan said. It is an incredibly important step for Ireland to take to have a regularisation scheme of this nature. We do not need to look far around us at political attitudes towards migration to know a person will be quite an outlier if he or she does something of this nature. I pay homage to the Justice for the Undocumented campaign, which comprises undocumented people who took the risk of leading on that work with the support of the Migrant Rights Centre and all the other organisations in that area. It is a brilliant scheme and many of the details are very generous. I refer in particular to aspects such as allowing those who have been in the asylum process for more than two years to make an application and, as Sr. Keenan said, to keep their international protection application running concurrently as well as getting a residency status, getting on with their lives and being able to be integrated in, and to contribute to, the community.

There will be issues and there will be those who do not qualify. Somebody might reach the end of the six-month period next year and have been in the State for only three years and ten months, not four years. If he or she applies as an individual and does not apply under this administrative detail, there is a question as to what happens to that person. There are also those who are stuck in administrative processes, whether relating to appeals or other decisions or because they are in circumstances whereby they are in limbo. Because of that, they may have a combination of time spent legally in the State and time spent undocumented in the State, which may or may not add up to four years, or three years if they are a family. They may not qualify either; what will happen to them?

The experience is that undocumented migration, as I said earlier, is an element of every immigration system in the world.

In the vast majority of cases, it is people who fall out of the system for various reasons, some of which we discussed today, such as relationship breakdown. The fact that we are doing it in Ireland is brilliant, but it is a once-off. It was announced by the Minister last week as a once in a lifetime regularisation scheme. While it is fantastic that we are doing it in Ireland, the fact remains that in 12 months after the scheme, undocumented migration will still be an issue for some in Ireland. However, hopefully several thousand people will be able to fix their situations through this application.

We need to build into our long-term thinking on immigration how we deal with instances where somebody has fallen out of the immigration system for whatever reason and how we get them back into it as quickly as possible so that they are not presenting at homeless services or social welfare offices with questions about their status and going around to social services in a loop, with civil society organisations accompanying them, and a long run of 12 months or longer of trying to get them back into an immigration status. Ultimately, and hopefully, they will end up back in an immigration status anyway. We need to imbed the kind of principle embodied by the regularisation scheme into our long-term thinking about migration and integration in Ireland.