Dr David Orr said that a disproportionate number of foreign children are admitted to the Burns Unit at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin every year.

"We are continuing to see unexpectedly high numbers of children from immigrant families. One of the major reasons for this is that families are being put up by the government in places that don't have any kitchen facilities like hostels or B&Bs or hotels. We have found that a lot of these big scalds and burns are occurring in children who are living in this type of accommodation."

Orr referred in particular to a recent case in which a young child was scalded in a bath while his mother was out of the room. "She had to go to a different part of the building, where there was a communal kitchen, just to heat milk for a bottle, " he said. "That's a typical example of what's happening. Really, if the government is putting up families for any length of time, they have to make sure that they are given adequate facilities to cook for themselves."

Such was the excessive number of non-national children presenting with burn injuries at Our Lady's hospital that Orr undertook an official study into the situation, which was published last month in the medical journal Burns.

The study was conducted from May 2003 to April 2004, and found that while immigrants accounted for only 0.3% of the population at that time, they made up 11.4% of the burns patients being admitted to the unit.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice said that immigrant families are not provided with individual kitchen facilites for health and safety reasons. "The centres for asylum seekers adhere to the highest standards of health and safety, and the families are provided with three meals a day, " he said. "They are not allowed kitchen facilities or kettles in their rooms for safety reasons."