Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak. The figures the Minister, Deputy Coveney, gave in respect of work permits and all of that needs to be out there. I did not know that information until I heard it from him. Perhaps it is on some website but we need that positive information about what is happening as opposed to the mystery of not knowing what is going on and giving people an opportunity to use what is going on. I thank the Minister for that information.

As a Galway man, I want to condemn outright what happened at Ross Lake House Hotel in Oughterard. Nobody can condone the type of activity whereby a fine building is burned and destroyed. I worked to build that hotel in a former existence. To think it was burned to the ground is a sad day for Ireland and Galway. We must ask why people are reacting in such a way and doing this. One of the themes that is coming out of this discussion is the fact that there is a lack of transparent information. Local public representatives are not brought into the discussion about plans to place people in communities. Community groups are not engaged with prior to decisions being made so a plan can be worked out which the community can buy in to and make a success of. There is no reason to hold things in secret because all that does is to feed the myth that something is going on. I field numerous calls from people who hear that something is going to happen in a certain place. They want to know if the intention is to house Ukrainian refugees or asylum seekers. In some cases, it happens. I never get information, officially or unofficially, from anybody in government. Public representatives should have that information before anything happens so we can prepare with the local communities to deal with what might be coming.

People have other huge concerns. People in my parish have a school bus ticket but cannot get a bus to school because the bus is not there. This has been going on since last September. Consider a child who has a disability but cannot get a service in children's disability network team 7, CDNT 7, in Tuam. We look at why these things are happening. In Athenry, for instance, there was an oversubscription of 150 applications to get into the secondary schools in Athenry for next September. That is the type of pressure we are working in.

As the Minister said, we have capacity challenges, including in respect of the resources to run this country. There are also capacity challenges in housing, which is the elephant in the room. I say to the Government that we need to do things differently. People from across the political spectrum have been democratically elected to make sure that the people who are coming into our country to seek asylum, people who are running from war, are treated properly and that everything is done in an open and transparent way so that people in this country understand the benefit of having more people come into the country. We must consider how we get them into work, integrate them into society and fill rural schools and all of that. It is great, but there has been so much pressure and so much has come at the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and his Department, that they do no have time to put a plan in place. We need a plan and a communication strategy, going forward.

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