Mr. Enda O'Neill:

In response to the Deputy's first question, the allocation of resources to the IPO in particular is always dependent on competing resource requirements within the Department of Justice and Equality more generally. It is difficult for external parties to say more than that but when we drafted the McMahon report, we tried to be proactive rather than reactive in planning for the future. The financial model developed for that report projected new applications for last year as slightly higher than the number that came in. The number of new applicants was predictable and could have been planned for. The report recommended front-loading of resources to put the priority on processing rather than reception and it projected that this would result in savings of €25.7 million in 2018 and €51.9 million in 2019. However, the situation in which we find ourselves now is that €3.4 million has been spent on emergency accommodation this year alone because of insufficient reception capacity.

Moving on to the Deputy's second question, without talking about a completely different model, it is important to acknowledge that the system as it stands today is quite different from the one 20 years ago, in many ways because of the implementation of the recommendations of the report. I would like to flag the fact that it has been put on a statutory basis through the reception conditions directive, which includes the right to work. Draft standards have also been agreed with officials of the Department of Justice and Equality. It just remains for the Government to sign them off and for them to be implemented.

We have done an awful lot to ensure that minimum standards have been defined in law and set out in standards to be applied when providing accommodation.

The next logical step is to review the operations and the tendering process to see how those standards can be put into practice and how uniformity can be guaranteed throughout the system. Officials appeared before the Committee of Public Accounts last month and flagged that the original tendering process will happen this year. I recommend that the Department take an open approach in consulting all relevant parties and that much effort be put into ensuring it is truly fit for purpose and flexible enough to allow for alternative models. If the standards are clearly defined, there is no reason that smaller accommodation units, clustered in a region, for example, could not be part of the solution. In the paper on measuring outcomes and supporting refugee integration that was circulated among members, I have tried to set out that much Government policy already exists and can be implemented in this space. One of the main challenges is that while the RIA is responsible for procuring accommodation, it is not an agency and it is does not do integration. It is limited in its role and dependent on the Departments of Health and of Education and Skills and other agencies and service providers to link with it and provide those services for accommodation centres. Sufficient authority is needed to ensure co-ordination and to link with all the other Departments.