Ms Catherine Kelly:

I will respond to the question on access for people with disabilities coming to Ireland. While people are coming in and everyone is reacting to it, they are not sure where the information is for someone to access it. The social welfare aspect is very clear when they arrive at the airport. However, there are issues like getting signed up with a GP. All the blocks are with access to the physical care that people need and access to accommodation, specifically for people with disabilities. There is no one place to go for a co-ordinated response.

We have been repeatedly asked to go back to Lublin and bring other families over. If we bring them over once we arrive with them, we are left with the same problem of where they can be housed. We can support accessing people's medical needs and all that, but we have no accommodation for anyone arriving here. That gives rise to a moral issue: are we bringing them over to go into a system that may retraumatise them?

Mr. Harris and the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, have spoken about many people with disabilities being in camps in Moldova where the authorities are not able to cope with them. The human response is to go and bring people over. We are not proactively bringing people with disabilities over. We have no co-ordinated response. We know people are in institutions and some of them are dying in institutions. There is no European response to go and get those individuals out of the institutions. Across Europe we need to agree how many are going to which countries and exactly what we will do for them. That does not exist.