Mr. Jody Clarke:

Typically people arrive in Dublin Airport and are met by officials from the Department of Justice and Equality. They are then brought to a direct provision centre called Balseskin in Fingal in north Dublin. They will typically stay there for a couple of weeks, although sometimes two or three months, while Department of Justice and Equality officials from the office for the promotion of migrant integration look for accommodation and a community in which to settle them. In 2013, we had 31 Afghans who came from Syria. Originally they fled Afghanistan in the 1980s, following the Soviet invasion, to Syria where they lived for the past 20 years or so. Given what is happening in Syria, we wanted to resettle them here and they are resettled in Tullamore.

There is a policy of dispersal where, to avoid the fear of ghettoising people in cities, people are placed in different parts of the country. There are south Sudanese in Kilkenny and Congolese in Monaghan, while the new intake of Syrians are in Portlaoise and in Thurles, Tipperary. People get on quite well but, as one can imagine, it can be a shock to the system to go to a completely new place. Communities take quite well to them. An integration officer is hired who helps them settle into the community and access services and so on. Department of Justice and Equality officials help people go through the sort of things we take for granted such as opening of a bank account. We think this sort of thing easy but someone who has lived in a refugee camp for 20 years has no idea of how to do it. Overall, that policy of distributing people around the country works very well.

The policy is probably no surprise. It is approximately 100 years since 3,000 or so Belgian refugees came to Ireland. They went to Monaghan, Cavan, Cork and Donegal. We have the same thing again today. We hear stories of Huguenot refugees in the 1600s. They were in Portarlington, which was once called Frenchtown, and they were in Dublin. Around the corner from here, we have the Huguenot cemetery. D'Olier Street is a Huguenot name. We had the Palatine fathers before that, who settled in Limerick. The idea that refugees come here and settle into new communities is not a new thing. Whether they are of a different religion or nationality or speak different languages, typically, after a short while, they integrate quite well.