Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

When we lose an existing accommodation provider, it is a significant task for the Department to have to find additional accommodation for everybody there as well as for people who are newly arriving. I also recognise it is very significant for the people who have been living in that particular accommodation, be they from Ukraine or be they international protection applicants, who may have been living there for a while and may have put down some roots and developed some element of stability. I recognise that moving people in those circumstances is really difficult but it is a consequence of the fact that we have placed a heavy reliance on hotel accommodation in order to meet the needs of the significant number of people arriving in our country. We would not have been able to accommodate that number of Ukrainians if we were not using hotels and we would have had to stop or would have had to inform the Ukrainian authorities that we could not accommodate people very early, in March or April of this year. We would not have been able to mount the sort of humanitarian response that we have done, had we not used hotels. We are now looking at other sources, both for Ukrainians and for international protection applicants, and one of those sources is the refurbishment of larger buildings, such as office buildings, on a temporary basis. As the Deputy knows, we have brought forward two statutory instruments to allow for that from a planning point of view. One was initially for beneficiaries of temporary protection but a subsequent statutory instrument was introduced for international protection applicants to allow for an exemption to planning processes in these circumstances.