Mr Varadkar made the comments at a Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting as TDs and senators were given a factsheet on immigration which is to be used to counter increasing levels of disinformation surrounding the divisive debate.
Justice Minister Helen McEntee emailed TDs and senators a Q&A on international protection ahead of the weekly meeting.
It comes ahead of a crucial meeting of the Cabinet Committee on the Ukrainian refugee crisis tomorrow afternoon.
The meeting is expected to see several ministers seek more funding to deal with the on going immigrations crisis.
The immigration factsheet sets out Ireland’s international obligations and highlights the process for applying for asylum in this country.
It says the Geneva Convention, of which Ireland and 149 countries are signatories, states that seeking international protection is a human right and counties must examine all applicants seeking protection.
The document says each applicant is fingerprinted and photographed and their information is checked against international crime databases. It also says to get refugee status or Permission to Remain in Ireland, character and conduct checks are also carried by An Garda Síochána.
The fact also addresses questions around the increase in international protection applications in Ireland
“There’s been an increase of international applications across the world, not just in Ireland,” it says.
“The reasons are really complex but essentially there are more and more people who are the victims of global conflicts, of persecution and human rights violations.
“To put the numbers here in Ireland into some sort of context, across the wider EU there were well over a million asylum applications last year. Here in Ireland we only had around 1.2pc of those. Roughly about 13,000 people,” it says.
It also addresses the question of whether Ireland is receiving more IP applications than the EU average.
The factsheet says the “short answer is no, not really”.
It says in 2023, there were approximately 13,200 applications for International Protection and “until recently” Ireland was well below the EU average when it came to the number of International Protection applicants. In 2022 and 2023 that number has stabilised at a level around the EU average.
“Other EU Member States like Cyprus, Austria and Greece receive a disproportionately high number of international protection applications,” it says.
It also says records show people applying for protection come through the border with Northern Ireland.
“The Common Travel Area (CTA) which allows for visa free travel between the UK and Ireland has, unfortunately, always been used by a small proportion of people for irregular purposes – in both directions,” it says.
The sheet says there is “very good co-operation at operational level between” the Border
Management Unit (BMU), Garda National immigration Bureau (GNIB) and colleagues in the UK Border Force and Immigration Enforcement.
It says there’s a “particular focus on securing the external border of the CTA”.
“Ireland and the UK have ongoing operations to identify any illegal movement patterns within the CTA and are taking action to disrupt such abuse,” it adds.