Ms Oonagh Buckley:

The Deputy’s first question regarded whether all healthcare workers have moved out. The short answer is that through our labour market access records we were able to identify 160 people who we thought were working in a care setting and might need solutions to be provided for them. We proactively tried to contact each of those healthcare workers. In fact, we asked a particular NGO to help us do so, which it readily did. Unfortunately, there was a relatively low take-up of the accommodation offers by the healthcare workers. Between 10% and 20% of them indicated a willingness to accept such an offer. There are many reasons for that, such as that they have family in the direct provision centre and do not wish to leave them or they are perfectly happy in the direct provision centre. Many people are quite happy where they are. The accommodation on offer from the employer or the HSE may not have been of the right kind or they were not happy with it. The choices open to us were to evict them from our centres or tell them they must give up their job in healthcare, neither or which we were willing to do. As such, all we can do is to continue to recommend to people that they take up the offer. We are continuing to do so, but it is not mandatory for people to take up the offer.

On the JRS support line, we got it up and running on Thursday. We had been working on it for a couple of weeks. In the first two days, we received 11 calls. Ten of those issues had been resolved by the time we got a report yesterday morning. The line is up and running and it is a very useful way for people who need to raise an issue, for whatever reason, to so do. We continue to ask people who have a problem to, please, tell us about it first because we can fix it. If they raise a problem about their centre, that information will never travel across into the International Protection Office. It will have no effect whatsoever on one’s application for asylum or permission to remain.