Ms Oonagh McPhillips:

I am grateful for the opportunity to address the committee to discuss the 2021 appropriation account for Vote 24. I am also grateful to the Comptroller and Auditor General and his team for their diligence and courtesy. I am joined by my colleagues, who have been introduced.

This Vote is one of six in the sector as a whole, and it funds a wide range of activity, as the Comptroller and Auditor General has outlined, both in the Department itself and in 20 statutory agencies and bodies. Together, there are more than 3,000 staff who have a nationwide footprint and who carry out a variety of important roles on behalf of the public. The Department also has a global reach, with almost 40 officers posted in 11 Irish embassies and missions across four continents and working on a broad range of immigration and international justice issues.

As the Comptroller and Auditor General has noted, the Vote was substantially realigned in 2021 to take account of the Department's major restructuring and the transfer of our integration and equality responsibilities to the newly expanded Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth in 2020. These changes rationalised the structure and reduced the number of programmes from five to two, namely, criminal justice and civil justice.

During 2021, the impact of the pandemic continued to affect the work of the Department. This necessitated making arrangements to protect and maintain the public services we provide, introducing remote working, onboarding hundreds of new staff over the past three years and safeguarding and supporting all our colleagues, including those serving abroad, especially those who had to remain on the workplace front line and in public-facing roles throughout the pandemic. It also included supporting all the agencies under our remit to continue to deliver their essential services to the public.

I must also mention the ongoing impact of the war in Ukraine on our work throughout 2022 and this year. More than 82,000 Ukrainian people have now been granted temporary protection by our response team. This response has involved an incredible level of leadership, collegiality and commitment from our immigration staff. The team now includes more than 20 Ukrainian colleagues, who have been of great practical assistance and support to the team and of course to the applicants for temporary protection.

The Department's original net allocation for 2021, the year under examination, was approximately €403 million. This was broken down by gross expenditure of €476 million, less estimated appropriations-in-aid of €77 million, and included a capital carryover of €3.9 million relating to the construction of the new forensic science laboratory.

The Department's mission of working for a safe, fair and inclusive Ireland encompasses a wide range of responsibilities. Despite the unexpected challenges of 2021 and 2022, a significant body of work was progressed. Strengthening the safety of all communities remains a cross-government priority. In 2021, the Department established three local community safety partnerships, LCPs, on a pilot basis, namely, in Dublin's north inner city, in Longford and in Waterford, which will help to inform the roll-out of the new community safety model nationwide following the enactment of the Policing, Security and Community Safety Bill. The partnerships, which are led by very effective independent chairs, have done tremendous work to date. We also established an implementation process overseen by a very effective board to improve community safety and well-being in Drogheda. More recently, we adopted a similar approach in Cherry Orchard. The community safety policy is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It is a whole-of-government effort, designed to support people to be safe and feel safe in their own community. It very much relies on empowering communities, not just to identify issues that impact safety, but also to propose and, importantly, to prioritise solutions that will work for them. It also relies on resources being made available. The community safety innovation fund, established in April 2021, is a good example of this approach. For the first time, the fund allows proceeds of crime to be directed into community projects to support community safety. A total of €2 million was allocated in 2022 and the 2023 open call for community safety innovation funding closed just last week. This year will see €3 million from the proceeds of crime reinvested to support the development of community safety through innovative, local and national community-based initiatives.

The new youth justice strategy was published in 2021 to support young people and divert them away from crime. It runs to 2027 and it is complementary to the community safety strategy. The immediate priority of the strategy is to enhance engagement with children and young people who are most at risk of involvement in criminal activity. This is another area where the funding available has been substantially boosted, increasing from around €18 million in 2021 to a total of approximately €30 million this year, and this supports youth diversion projects all across the country.

Tackling the scourge of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence, DSGBV, is a priority for the Government and the Department. We worked closely with victims and survivors to develop and publicise in a completely new way Coco's Law, the Harassment, Harmful Communication and Related Offences Act 2021, as well as a range of other measures aimed at combating gender-based violence. Members may have noticed the launch this week of a second awareness campaign highlighting to the public that threatening to share intimate images is also a criminal offence. Following a very detailed co-design process undertaken in partnership with civil society organisations, in June 2022 the Minister, Deputy McEntee, published Zero Tolerance, the third national strategy on domestic, sexual and gender-based violence. Since then, the Department has done a lot of work, again in close conjunction with the sector and colleagues across government, to design and develop the new DSGBV agency. This will be a permanent statutory entity, exclusively focussed on gender-based violence and abuse, which we aim to have in place from the start of next year.

As committee members will be aware, the third national strategy rightly focuses on increasing the number of refuge places in Ireland in line with the guidance in the Istanbul Convention, but its most significant, ambitious and hopefully most enduring feature is more fundamental: to change the underlying societal attitudes and culture where this type of harmful behaviour thrives.

Public awareness and education are central to supporting this change. I can assure the committee there is commitment to this from my colleagues across all Departments. Over the past few years, as the pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine, impacted the provision of immigration services to our customers, the staff of the Department have worked to develop innovative and people-centred solutions. I have already mentioned the work done to protect people fleeing from Ukraine. This period also saw the introduction of a scheme to regularise undocumented people living in Ireland. I am glad to say this once-off programme has so far enabled eligible applicants to remain and reside in the State lawfully, to regularise their residency status, thus allowing them to maximise their own potential and, importantly, that of their children.

A key change in the way we work, particularly in our public-facing operational areas, is the start of a programme of significant investment in our information management and technology systems. The schemes for both Ukraine and the undocumented operate on a completely paperless basis. In fact, more than 80% of immigration applications have now transitioned from paper-based to online applications. This provides for a significantly improved service to our customers and also supports the efficiency of the services. An entirely new immigration website was delivered in 2021 and is now available in the 12 most common languages of our customers. An overarching modernisation programme for immigration services has recently commenced. I hope to be in a position to report further significant further improvement in our service delivery in the coming years.

As members will be aware, the immigrant investor programme ran from 2012 until February of this year, when the Minister, Deputy Harris, obtained approval from the Government to close the programme to further new applications from 15 February 2023. The programme was established during a time of unprecedented economic difficulty to stimulate investment in Ireland that would be of strategic and public benefit to the State. In fairness, the programme did make a contribution to attracting inward investment and particularly job creation at a very difficult time. The State's position is now thankfully vastly different, and while the programme served a purpose in generating investment for job creation projects at a point in time, the nature of the programme shifted over recent years so that its purpose is no longer justified in the context of the risks. The risk environment has also changed, and Ireland is not alone in reconsidering the continued appropriateness of such programmes. It is appreciated that closure of the programme has given rise to many queries and concerns on the part of individuals and organisations with an interest in the programme.

We are committed to an orderly wind-down and the management of the closure in a way that is fair to all. I assure the committee that the Department is aware of the many organisations that are anxious to receive a decision and we will communicate in a timely manner with the individuals and organisations concerned. The programme's independent evaluation committee has requested that an analysis be undertaken to assist it in the task of ensuring that the closure of the programme is carried out in a manner that is consistent and fair to applicants. The committee is committed to more frequent and intense engagement to progress these matters. The patience of stakeholders is requested over the coming months while this work is completed. I can go into further detail if members require.