Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan is anticipated to inform a Cabinet sub-committee that his Department is beginning to observe a clear decline in the number of International Protection applications, reports RTE.
RTÉ News has learned that there has been a 43% decrease in applications during the first half of this year when compared with the same timeframe in 2024.
According to data from the Department of Justice, the number of IPAS cases had been increasing steadily in recent years, peaking at 18,500 last year, reports RTE.
However, there has also been a notable acceleration in how applications are being processed. This improvement is credited to a considerable boost in funding for the international protection system. Alongside digital transformation and the redesign of key procedures, these changes have significantly expanded the system’s processing capacity.
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Statistics reveal that in 2024, the International Protection Office issued over 14,000 initial decisions, a rise from more than 8,500 in 2023. Meanwhile, the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) concluded approximately 3,100 appeals in 2024, compared to over 1,700 the previous year, reports RTE.
It is anticipated that even more decisions will be completed in 2025.
Accelerated processing, introduced in November 2022, was applied to applicants from designated safe countries, those already granted protection elsewhere in Europe, and individuals from countries submitting particularly high volumes of applications, reports RTE.
This approach is believed to have led to a sharp drop in application numbers from those regions.
In 2023, there were 2,082 applications from Nigerian nationals. That number increased to 4,035 in 2024, but has since declined to 926 in the first half of this year, reports RTE.
Applications from Algerian nationals also dropped significantly, from 1,462 in 2023 to 281 in 2024, and further down to 64 during the first six months of this year.
The first half of 2025 has likewise experienced a decrease in IPAS applications from Palestinians, reports RTE.
There were 118 applications in 2023, rising to 957 in 2024, then falling to 65 in the first six months of this year.
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