Dr. Fergal Lynch:

I will repeat what I said about the Ombudsman and the complaints mechanism. I made the point that we very much welcome the fact that the Ombudsman's team have been visiting individual centres. We always welcome the feedback we get from that. I know the residents of the centres welcome the opportunity to talk the Ombudsman's team.

I also made the point that we have put much work into a customer service team to deal with complaints in the centres. We have put in place a central processing and reporting of complaints mechanism. We have also worked on an internal set of review meetings and discussions in relation to complaints, with a helpdesk in place as well.

We have placed a good deal of emphasis on dealing with people's complaints, be it in relation to the pandemic or other issues that they have. We are also developing and scoping a consumer consultation group from our customer base in IPAS to try to seek input, observations and suggestions as to how we might develop that for future. We have placed a good deal of emphasis on that in terms of complaints.

I can confirm that the inspections were all unannounced. That is the way we do our business. It is important that we would do it that way so that we ensure that we are seeing the centre as it genuinely is.

On the reception and integration centres, we are looking at different options at the moment. I do not want to be too specific because decisions have not been made as yet, but certainly we are looking at the scope for locating some of those centres on existing sites. They will be new build as opposed to the existing facilities. We are also obviously looking at developing new centres in other parts of the country but one of them will be in Dublin.

On income support, there is already a system of income support in phase one. Essentially, the plan is that would be maintained in more or less an equivalent way. There will be no question of not having support in phase one. However, when we move to phase two we recognise that we need a much more developed system. I hope that answers the Deputy's questions.