Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

When people arrive here, my Department is ensuring that we have a one-stop shop in Dublin Airport, as well as other facilities in Limerick, Cork and Dublin and Rosslare. We work closely with the Department of Justice on this issue. It provides refugees with temporary visas, and then we immediately give them personal public service numbers. Once they have those, refugees get supplementary welfare support. They will qualify for a weekly payment of €206, plus any qualifying payment for dependant children. The figures show that the majority of people coming here, some 88% or 89%, are women and children, and the first thing we want to do is to give them some financial security, and they are getting that. We will come back to them in due course and put them in contact with the relevant social protection payments, and the disability allowance is one of those payments. These refugees have full entitlement to all the supports the State provides to EU and Irish citizens.

Much work is ongoing in this regard. The people arriving have come from horrific situations and are traumatised. The Department and its staff are working hard to ensure that they get all the support they need. As I said, that includes people with disabilities getting disability allowance payments. The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, and the Minister of State with special responsibility for disability, Deputy Rabbitte, are exploring what more can be done to help people with disabilities arriving here and perhaps identify how we can put supports in place to help them.