Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

My Department was providing accommodation to 7,500 thousand people in December 2021 and is now providing accommodation to more than 100,000 people. No other Department has ever had to meet such an enormous humanitarian challenge in such a tight period. I have always accepted in this House that the response has not been perfect and there are elements we could do better. If we had known there was going to be a war in Ukraine breaking out in February 2022, we could have done things differently, but we did not know that. Nobody knew that and we have had to respond in the best way we could to meet the basic needs of people here fleeing that war and wars in Syria and Afghanistan and conflicts throughout the Middle East. We have done our best with the system we had. While we are meeting those very immediate daily needs, we are also bringing forward reforms to make that system different in the future.

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