Ms Oonagh Buckley:

It is. There have been some very positive developments on that front. Up to the end of last year, people had to be brought to Dublin, in many cases for an overnight stay, for their International Protection Office, IPO, interviews. At the instigation of the Minister, we have instituted a pilot with the IPO which allows interviews to be held closer to the residents of the direct provision system. An initial outing was held in our office in Tipperary town. It worked extremely successively, save that it was in Tipperary town, when it needed to be closer to our population. We now propose to run those interviews in a more co-ordinated way, in Cork in the initial phase. As Cork is within an hour of approximately one third of the population of our direct provision centres, it presents a highly achievable way of delivering the IPO interview process. We are also looking at delivering similar interviews in Sligo, which would be extremely helpful for people in the north west, particularly those living in Donegal. There is a prospect of delivering services closer to the people. That is standard for services to Irish citizens but it is not how we have traditionally managed the interview process in the IPO system. We are working very hard to deliver that over the course of this year.

I agree with the Deputy about location. It has been policy for a long time to disperse people across the country so that all asylum applicants are not gathered in, for example, Dublin. That would be extremely difficult in the context of the current accommodation situation. It is much better for people to be dispersed across the country. As a consequence, Ireland has had a great dispersal of people with permission to remain or refugee status. They are dispersed across all communities. Every part of the country has been able to accommodate people and to bring them into the system. The procurement model which has been adopted for direct provision centre means that we accept any centre that is offered to us if it meets our standards. It is not the case that we choose a particular location but is a case of accepting what is offered to us. We are very interested in hearing the views of the committee as to whether there should be more direction as to where we locate centres and as to how that might be done. We will be considering the future of the way in which we procure and select sites for direct provision centres at the interdepartmental group I am chairing.