Mr. Enda O'Neill:

On the location of reception centres, I fully agree that transport is essential to allow people to go to the shops in a local town or access the services they need. One measure that was introduced by the reception conditions is a vulnerability assessment. While that is a new process and we will have to see how it will work out in practice, it has been incorporated into the standards. The intention is that upon arrival, people will be assessed for their reception needs, which will include access to medical services, counselling services and so on. On an ongoing basis, someone from a social care background in each reception centre will be tasked with ensuring that assessment is up to date and that no new needs have been identified. One can imagine that system working well if it was developed in co-operation with other service providers and Departments, along the lines indicated by Mr. Justice McMahon, namely, access to employment and mental health services, including specialist counselling services and others of a similar nature. That is not currently happening in any systematic way but it is provided for in the legislation and included in the standards, and we hope it will become an important part of the system in the future.

With dispersal, interviews with asylum applicants could be relocated throughout the country. Not all the services must be centred in Dublin. We have had some recent indications that asylum applicants could be interviewed in County Tipperary, and Cork is also under consideration. There are ways, therefore, to ease the burden on people living in those locations. In the resettlement domain, a task force at national level has representatives from each Department, while there is an interagency group at local authority level. In 2015, there was an agreement on dispersal throughout the country and the numbers that each local authority area could expect. The same process is not replicated in this space. I do not see any reason, however, that those types of structures could not be put on a more permanent footing and include resettled refugees and refugees who arrive spontaneously, in order that there is appropriate planning at local authority level and cross-departmentally to ensure that people have access to adequate services, irrespective of where they are located.

On predicting the numbers, we in Ireland are quite fortunate from that point of view. We are not so easy to reach compared with other European countries and we are at the end of the line of many migratory routes.

The numbers have been fairly steady in recent years.

On Brexit, we sometimes see movement from the UK. It is something which is harder to predict. The Dublin regulation is the law which regulates which country has responsibility for the determination of an applicant's claim. It is EU legislation and what happens to that after Brexit may have a big impact. We do not have a clear answer on that now.