FALSE CLAIMS THAT Georgians are the largest group of asylum seekers in Ireland have been shared online, along with claims that the EU Migration Pact is a “con-job”.

A Facebook post shared dozens of times appears to make the case that the Irish government intentionally created a migration crisis in Ireland to create a need for the EU Migration Pact, which went into force on 12 June.

The EU Migration and Asylum Pact is a mammoth overhaul of the way countries manage immigration and asylum processing, designed to standardise immigration laws and policy across the EU. 

However, the post shared on Facebook lists out a number of supposed “facts” to support the claim that the government engineered a migration crisis, which are either inaccurate, or cherry-picked to exaggerate the differences in how countries process asylum claims. 

Data is shown in a table posted online compares the number of asylum seekers and their acceptance rate in Ireland compared to France. It appears to be making the case that Ireland is too open to allowing asylum seekers to stay.

However, figures compared between the two countries are not taken from the same years, distorting the comparison.

More notably, some of the claims are just wrong.

“Helping ‘asylum seekers’”, the column on the chart headed “Ireland” begins.

“Biggest population: Georgian”.

This is false. The nation of origin for the highest proportion of asylum seekers so far this year is Somalia, followed by Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Georgia comes fifth in the list.

However, the chart does not specify that it referred to 2026; it could have meant the previous year.

But in 2025, the nation of origin for the highest proportion of applicants for international protection was Somalia. Georgians were, again, fifth on the list.

Similarly, Georgia was not the country with the highest number of applicants in 2024 — it placed even lower, at eighth, behind those same countries, as well as Palestine, Bangladesh and Jordan.

In 2023, it placed third.

One has to go back to 2022 before Georgia tops the list as the nation of origin for the highest proportion of asylum seekers to Ireland.

Using figures from 2022 to claim that Georgians are the highest proportion of asylum seekers would be misleading in itself. But the deception is more glaring if one takes into account what has happened since then.

In November 2022, an accelerated decision-making process was introduced, which meant that international protection applicants to Ireland from so-called “safe countries” should receive a first decision on their application within 90 days.

A “safe country” is the official designation given to a number of listed countries from which people may seek asylum but are subject to different process than those not listed.

The term does not imply that anyone from a country on the list seeking asylum is disingenuous. Rather, it means that the country generally has no persecution, and applicants must show why they are unable to seek reprieve within their own country.

Ireland has classified Georgia as a “safe country” since 2018.

Stats from May 2026 show that the median processing time for applicants under the accelerated procedure was 12 weeks.

CSO data shows that there were 2,459 international protection applicants from Georgia in 2022, but that this dropped to 638 by 2024.

Using selective data from 2022 to claim that the government engineered a crisis using Georgian asylum seekers to bring in an EU migration pact makes little sense.

The same data from later years shows a massive decrease in asylum claims from Georgia, years before the pact came into force.

Georgia is currently considered a candidate country for the EU, which under new EU rules, which means the same rules apply to it as “safe countries of origin”.

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