NEARLY €350,000 has been spent this year fielding questions by TDs on behalf of non- nationals unsure about their residency status in Ireland.

It has emerged that 1,711 parliamentary questions relating solely to immigration have been asked since January, each costing around €200 to deal with.

The department of justice said the queries were a major drain on resources even though a streamlined process had been put in place to deal with them.

"To date this year, a total of 1,711 parliamentary questions relating to immigration matters have been asked and answered by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform," a department statement said. "It is estimated that the cost of answering a parliamentary question is in the region of €200."

More than half of the questions have come from a single TD, Fine Gael's Bernard Durkan; 898 questions, or €179,600 worth, were asked by him alone.

"That's the oldest trick in the book when the department doesn't want to address the serious issues I am raising, Durkan told the Sunday Tribune. "It doesn't cost any more to answer the question in the Dáil than it does to answer it anywhere else; the same research has to be done. The only difference is that when it appears in the Dáil, the minister must stand over it.

"I do not send for these people. They come to me. Some of them have been in the asylum process for 10 years and haven't a clue what is happening. I totally and emphatically reject this old trick of attaching costs to answering these questions."

The department of justice said it had put in place a service for TDs and senators to make inquiries about immigration outside the Dáil.

"The Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service has offered a service to provide answers by way of email. This enables the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service to focus staff resources on processing cases rather than the time-consuming preparation of answers to very large numbers of parliamentary questions."

However, PQs have continued to flood in: on the opening day of the Dáil, close to 100 queries were dealt with.