Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I believe migration is a good thing. If it was not for migration, I would not exist. My parents met in England when they were both migrants. My mother was an Irish nurse while my father was an Indian doctor. Migration has been broadly a good thing for Ireland. When I got into the big tech and pharma companies that are employing so many people and paying so much tax in Ireland, I see a very diverse and multilingual workforce. It is one of the reasons why they are here. When I go into hospitals, I see a very diverse workforce and I suggest that we would not be able to run our public services at all without migration. It has also made Ireland a more interesting place and enriches us culturally. I always like to say that when I talk about migration because it is important to frame that. Believing in appropriate controlled migration does not mean you are against migration. We are probably in a similar space in that regard.

Regarding many of the offers of accommodation that have been made by people, I acknowledge that we could have done a better job. The Ukraine war happened. Tens of thousands of people were on the move. Thousands of people offered accommodation and we were not set up to deal with that. We relied very much on the Red Cross to do it for us and the Red Cross is a small organisation and struggled to deal with it too. It is much better now. I went through the experience myself because we took somebody from Ukraine into our home. Unfortunately, a lot of those offers did not materialise - not because of fault on the part of the Government or the Red Cross. People were contacted and did not get back to us. People did need to go through a certain amount of procedure such as Garda vetting and some people were unwilling to do that. A doctor I know decided to withdraw the offer to accommodate somebody from Ukraine because he was annoyed at being asked to be Garda vetted. There are also stories of people who did not get a call and were very annoyed that they did not. When you go through the process, you are asked to make a minimum commitment of six months. I can understand that when the war started and people saw these horrific scenes on the news and saw people from Ukraine fleeing to Europe, they thought "I'd love to take in somebody in for a few weeks or maybe take somebody in for a few months". When they were told that the minimum commitment was six months and it could be longer, a lot of people for totally understandable reasons were not willing to go forward with their offer so that was part of it too. However, I do acknowledge that it could have been done better. I met lots of people who were very annoyed that weeks after making an offer, they received very little or no contact.

We will have people in modular homes in the next few weeks. I get worried sometimes when people talk about modular housing or modern methods of construction because they sometimes talk about them as though they are quick and cheap options that can produce thousands of houses in a few weeks. That is not the case. We have been through this and it is going to be a reality. You need a site, it needs to be serviced with electricity, it needs a road to it and water connections and you have to order the modular unit and are often put in a queue. The people who make modular units have order books and you have to join the queue. You need to work out some really practical things that we discovered as we started learning by doing when it comes to this. Getting the modular unit from the factory to the site is one example. You have to make sure there are no low bridges because you cannot get the modular unit under the low bridge. These are all things we did not know and we had to discover by doing. Yes, it is part of the solution - I am all for it - but let us not tell people that modular housing or modern methods of construction are quick and cheap ways of getting houses. They are not. They are about the same cost and possibly a bit quicker and we are doing it.

I agree with the Deputy about speeding up decisions on asylum applications. We have to speed up decisions. We are investing an extra €18 million this year in doing that so that in respect of people, particularly those coming from safe countries, which is close to half if not the majority of asylum seekers, an initial decision is made in the first three months.