Mr. Niall Burgess:

The work we do with families with bereavements is some of the most difficult and sensitive work we do. It is in the nature of things nowadays that Irish people are travelling further, staying longer, travelling at an older age and travelling at a younger age. That means that the number of assists with bereavements has been increasing. The number of cases where families have genuine financial difficulties with repatriation are a modest proportion of those cases. That is where organisations such as the KBRT play a vital role and provide support. We take a human and flexible approach to how we work with citizens and that approach has stood us in good stead.

We have to continuallly review the suite of consular services and the way we provide them. That was something we did when we brought our honorary consuls back to Ireland in 2019. On expanding the footprint, those two missions in Morocco and Philippines will open this year and not next year. We will have them open in the autumn. That will leave us with a plan to potentially open another 12 missions over the following four years. The average we are working towards is about three per year.

On the physical security reviews, we are putting more time, care and attention into physical security than ever before. We are working on this jointly with other partners to some extent. I was involved, for example, in the collocation of our embassy in Cairo with another EU partner, where we were able to significantly benefit from their security systems, and that brought particular assurance to our staff. We carry out a rolling programme of security reviews with the support of An Garda Síochána. Security is fundamental to the way we are opening new properties and we have built that expertise into our property management unit as well.

The simple reality now is that one might have held security as a primary consideration in more fragile parts of the world but some of the most difficult security issues I have had to deal with as Secretary General have been in response to events in Paris and Brussels, where we have large numbers of staff. The old assumptions around security and how it operates simply no longer apply, which means we have to step up our support.