Policy Comparison

Austria Built a Remigration Ministry. Ireland Has Not Had the Conversation.

June 2026 · 8 min read

Austria elected a remigration government in September 2024. By January 2025, Herbert Kickl was Chancellor with a dedicated returns infrastructure, €1,000 voluntary departure payments, and a legal framework Ireland has never considered. Here is what they built — and what the data shows about what it does.

What Happened in Austria

On 29 September 2024, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) won the Austrian federal election with 28.9% of the vote — the largest share of any party, and the first time the FPÖ had topped a national poll in its history. The party had campaigned explicitly on a platform of Remigration, using the word in its manifesto, its campaign slogan, and its post-election communications.

Coalition negotiations took until January 2025. When Herbert Kickl was sworn in as Federal Chancellor, he was the first FPÖ leader to hold the office. The coalition agreement with the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) included a dedicated chapter on migration enforcement, voluntary return incentives, and cooperation agreements with origin countries.

The Austrian Interior Ministry — now under FPÖ control — moved quickly. Within the first quarter of 2025, Austria had:

  • Extended bilateral return agreements with Afghanistan, Georgia, Tunisia, and Morocco
  • Launched a voluntary return programme offering one-time payments of €1,000 per adult, plus travel costs
  • Reinforced border controls at the Brenner Pass, the Slovenian border, and the Hungarian crossing at Nickelsdorf
  • Established a dedicated Returns Unit within the Interior Ministry with a specific budget line and performance targets
  • Tightened benefit eligibility conditions for international protection applicants during the pendency of their claims

The voluntary return programme is not new — Austria has run some version of it since the 1990s — but the 2025 iteration added the dedicated payment, simplified the application process, and targeted it at people with pending or rejected applications rather than only those with deportation orders already in place.

The Numbers Behind Austria's Approach

Austria is a country of roughly 9.1 million people. In 2023, it received 109,000 asylum applications — the second highest in the EU in per capita terms, behind only Cyprus. It has consistently been among the top five EU destination countries for international protection claims.

Austria's rejection rate for asylum claims is among the higher in the EU: approximately 54% of first-instance decisions in 2023 resulted in a negative outcome, according to Eurostat. Critically, Austria also has a significantly higher enforcement rate than Ireland — closer to 25–30% of removal orders resulting in actual removals, compared to Ireland's historical figure of around 3% and its improved but still gap-ridden 2025 figure of 45%.

That gap in enforcement rates is not explained by geography alone. Ireland is an island — in theory, enforcement should be easier, not harder, because there are fewer land borders. Austria shares borders with eight countries.

What Ireland Has Instead

Ireland has no dedicated returns ministry or returns unit equivalent. The function sits within the Immigration Service Delivery (ISD) division of the Department of Justice, staffed by civil servants who also handle visa processing, permissions renewals, and a range of other immigration functions.

There is no voluntary return payment equivalent in Ireland. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) operates a Voluntary Assisted Return and Reintegration Programme (VARRP) in Ireland, but it is funded by the European Return Fund and capped — it assisted 311 individuals in 2023, according to IOM Ireland's annual report. That is 311 voluntary returns from a pool of tens of thousands of people with outstanding orders or rejected claims.

Ireland's charter flight programme, which was substantially expanded in 2025, is enforcement-only. There is no parallel voluntary departure infrastructure operating at scale.

The Policy Choices That Differ

The Austrian model is not simply about having a tougher government. It reflects a series of administrative and legislative choices that Ireland has not made:

Dedicated institutional capacity. Austria treats returns as a primary function with its own staffing, budget, and accountability structure. Ireland treats it as one function among many within a department with an enormous remit.

Upstream intervention. Austria's voluntary return payment is available to applicants at the pending stage — before a final decision, before a deportation order. This is counterintuitive but logical: someone with an uncertain future and no right to work is a more willing participant in a voluntary return than someone who has been in the country for five years and built a life. Ireland's voluntary return assistance is available in theory but inaccessible in practice for most of this cohort.

Bilateral agreement depth. Austria has formal readmission agreements with a larger set of origin countries than Ireland, and it invests political capital in maintaining them. When an Afghan national with a rejected claim cannot be returned because the government of Afghanistan will not accept the flight, that is a bilateral failure — and it requires diplomatic work to resolve. Ireland has not invested equivalently in this function.

Political willingness to name the problem. This is harder to quantify but it matters. Austria's government ran on the word Remigration and won. Ireland's government does not use the word and treats enforcement as a logistical problem rather than a political one. The effect on public trust is not trivial.

What the Comparison Does and Does Not Show

This comparison does not suggest Austria's approach is without problems. The FPÖ's political history, the welfare restriction policies, and the conditions in Austrian return centres have all attracted serious human rights scrutiny from the Council of Europe and domestic courts. Enforcement-first immigration policy creates its own institutional pathologies.

What the comparison does show is that the policy choices Ireland has made — the institutional structure, the budget allocation, the diplomatic investment in bilateral agreements, the scale of voluntary return assistance — are choices. They are not inevitable consequences of Ireland's size, geography, or legal obligations. Other countries of comparable size and EU status make different choices and achieve different outcomes.

Austria's rejection rate is higher than Ireland's. Its enforcement rate is higher than Ireland's. Its voluntary return volume is higher than Ireland's. None of those things happened automatically. They happened because successive Austrian governments, culminating in the current one, treated migration enforcement as a primary institutional priority rather than an inherited problem to be managed.

The question for Ireland is not whether to replicate Austria's specific policies. It is whether to treat the gap between orders issued and orders enforced as a problem that requires institutional investment — or whether to continue treating it as an acceptable steady state.

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