Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Irish people are anti the Russian leadership and the decisions it is making right now. It is very important for all of us to keep delivering the message that Russian citizens in Ireland and Russian children in Irish schools should not be targeted or blamed for what is happening in Ukraine. This is not in their name. Russian people in Ireland are welcome. However, the decisions the Russian leadership and the Kremlin are making need to be strongly criticised by Ireland and that is what we are trying to do, and we are trying to make that clear distinction.

Regarding whether we should we be sending buses to the border to bring people back, I know some people personally who are planning to do that and are trying to organise that logistically. There are two airports, or numerous airports, that people can access. It is much easier to fly to Ireland than to get on a bus and make that journey. It is a long trip factoring in ferries and all the rest of it. We should, by and large, try to make it as easy as possible for people to come here and for them to fly here. Both Aer Lingus and Ryanair have been quite active in that space, as have other airlines. Members would be aware the Ministers, Deputies McEntee and Humphreys, were in Dublin Airport yesterday meeting Ukrainian refugees coming into the country. We want to make sure we have a structured welcome arrangement when they arrive so that people are not lost in the airport not knowing where to go. We are putting all those facilities in place now.

This is a massive logistical exercise. Ireland's allocation key, in terms of burden sharing, is normally about 2%. Four million people could end up coming from Ukraine into the EU. In fact, that is quite likely and it may go beyond that figure if the conflict continues. For every 1 million, that is 20,000 in Ireland. We may not reach those numbers, but it is certainly possible we will and we may go well beyond it. We need to be prepared for that and have a mindset that will allow us to cope with that. This is a wartime situation by which Ireland is being impacted.

We have seen the extraordinary generosity of Irish people making private offers of accommodation. I believe there have been up to 10,000 offers of accommodation on the Irish Red Cross website so far. The Minister for Justice and the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth are working to co-ordinate that, and we now have an agreed management system among Departments to determine how we manage it weekly. We are putting this together as we go because we simply do not have time to plan. There is no six-month lead-in time here; people are coming today. Somewhere between 400 and 600 people are expected to arrive from Ukraine today.

Senator Craughwell asked about the stated position on Irish neutrality. I was taking parliamentary questions in the House earlier and I think I gave strong answers on that. My view as to what Irish neutrality is, or military non-alignment, if people want to call it that, is that we decide when we get involved in a conflict or not and when we take sides or not, and our positions are not required of us by an alliance to which we have signed up that can suck us into a conflict and so on. It is up to the Government and the Parliament to decide what we do and when we do it. Nevertheless, let me be clear: in regard to what is happening in Ukraine, we are not neutral. In fact, we are actively funding and supplying equipment to the Ukrainian military to help it defend itself and the civilians in that country. We have chosen to take sides in that regard because we believe the Russian aggression is not only illegal and inconsistent with the UN charter but is also something on which Ireland, morally, needs to take a stand.