Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to open this important debate on the issue of how we afford protection for people who come to our country. Providing services and accommodation is hugely challenging and complex, and the circumstances have changed dramatically in the past three years. It is appropriate that we are giving time to discuss, debate and understand this issue.

Going right back, this country has always been open to the world and to people coming here. Over the generations we have seen people arrive in Ireland and make it their home. They become "more Irish than the Irish themselves" is the expression we remember from schooldays. It is true. Our culture, nation and way of being allow for inclusion and for people to come to become part of this Republic and, potentially, citizens. We certainly afford them refuge and provide a céad míle fáilte. Those words have never been truer than today because in the past three years we have been looking after housing and helping to provide refuge for some 100,000 people. There are 100,000 Ukrainians, of whom 75,000 are in State accommodation of one form or other. Approximately 26,000 people are in international protection systems. We have had to provide accommodation for 100,000 people, and that is beyond compare in the scale of challenge. I commend the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, the Minister of State, Deputy Joe O'Brien, who will speak shortly, the Minister for Justice, Deputy McEntee, and various elements of the Irish State. They have sought for us to be able to do that, as difficult as it has been.

As a small country, we have consistently placed great importance on international and multilateral agreement and international law. As a small country, which, in a sense, was under colonial rule in the past, that adherence to international law is fundamental to us. It is important. That is what we are doing in providing refuge. We are a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. We have to meet those international obligations. We cannot turn our back on them.

It is a challenge. We have gone from having in international protection some 8,300 beds as recently as January 2022, only two years ago, to 26,000 today. That is an incredible change. We were seeing typically 3,500 people coming to seek refuge here. That has increased to more than 13,000 in the past two years; a dramatic change.

We should be careful not to feel that we are the only country which has to bear this real challenge. Looking at the figures for the percentage of asylum seekers in each different jurisdiction in the European Union, Ireland sits pretty much on the European average. We are very close to the European average in the number of asylum applications per capita. I understand Ireland's percentage of all the applications that were made within the European Union last year was 1%, which is our percentage of the population. We are not alone in managing this huge crisis in how we offer and provide protection for people coming to our country.

We have to manage it and we have a real challenge because we have a fast-growing country. We have migration coming from a variety of sources. It is not just people coming from Ukraine or coming through the international protection system. We also have a very significant number of people returning home and people coming from the European Union who are entitled to come, live and work here. People come from other jurisdictions where we are providing work permits for them to come. That actually makes up the biggest number of the people coming to live and work in our country. They bring real benefits to our country, as do many of the people who come seeking protection.

We need to understand and we need to be able to explain to people, in order that they are not lost in fear that this is something we cannot manage or is a burden that we should pass or that we should try to put up the barriers, declaring that Ireland is full and saying that we cannot do this. We can and we will. We have to do it in a way that works for everyone, including those coming. That also recognises that there are limits in terms of the ability to cope at this time, when we are absolutely stretched. Providing the additional accommodation is becoming more challenging. The ability to get private accommodation has been very much constrained in the last year. For those reasons, we have sought to try to manage the flow coming in. We have changed the rules, for example, with people coming from Ukraine. We absolutely must provide safe refuge but the ability to house people in the same way we did two years ago has changed. That is not willingly or out of desire to change the rules but we have had to change the rules to provide that guarantee of 90 days' support and accommodation. We needed to recognise the truth that we cannot guarantee all the beds we might need were the flow to continue and that is why those rules were changed. It was not out of any other desire than to make sure we do not give false promise.

Likewise with international protection, very reluctantly we have had to change the rules whereby in effect we are not able to provide guaranteed accommodation particularly for single males coming into the country at this moment because we simply do not have the beds. It is not easy to develop and put those in place, as we all know from the instances that have got such attention and generated such tension in recent months. That is a challenge and that is why we have not been able to provide accommodation for 737 single men. We have set in place a system because this is about managing and not trying do harm to any one individual. We have introduced a triage system. For a variety of reasons, health or otherwise, we have provided accommodation for some 125 of those 737 single men because there was an actual immediate need for that to happen. It is trying to be flexible and practical. It is trying to recognise that we are limited in what we can do at this time.

There are other changes. First, there has been a huge increase in investment in the office within the Department of Justice processing applications in order that we act fast. It is very important in assessing an application that for both the applicant and for our ability to manage we do not take so long and that we accelerate the process, which is what is happening. I understand the number of people working in that Department on assessing applications has doubled in the last two to three years.

We also had yesterday's announcement by the Minister on the definition of safe countries and on recognising that someone who has got status in another European country is in different circumstances from someone coming here directly from a war-torn region. We need to manage the flow coming to our country in a way that makes sure we can deliver the services and what we are required to do under international law, under the convention for refugees, under the European law and under the basic tenets of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We will need to continue to evolve and within the coming weeks, the Government will look at how we manage on a more medium-term and long-term basis, recognising we will have to move towards less reliance on what might be called emergency accommodation. We need to scale up the likes of the Citywest facility we have and other such facilities in order that we have locations where we are not just looking on an emergency basis and ongoing rotating basis to try to provide accommodation for new arrivals.

We have work to do to explain to our people the challenges we have but also the obligations we have, what the nature of the systems are, and that there is a rational proper process based on human rights and respect, obviously, for local communities. I am sure the Minister of State, Deputy O'Brien, will talk about the work he is doing on community engagement. We will be going to Government in the coming weeks to make sure we continue to evolve and develop our protection system in order that it works for local communities and for people who are coming here seeking protection and that we can manage.

It is a significant challenge. We are spending €1.5 billion a year in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth alone. There is a huge role in the Department of Education, and in my Department, the Department of Transport, providing a transport system for the 100,000 people we have had to provide accommodation for. However, we can and will do this. We will be stronger as a country for living up to the tradition we have of being a welcoming country that respects, stands up for and delivers on our national, European and international legal obligations.

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