Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Our response at the moment is based on a learning from Covid. During Covid we had these local community response forums and that was the model that we, in a slightly different way, kick-started again at local authority level. We have community response forums that are operating at every local authority level now, initially in response to the Ukraine situation but which are also now working with international protection applicants.

Regarding the budget line, this is an additional €10 million. The beginning of it was 2022. After the initial inflow of people, we got an initial €5 million for SICAP and half a million for the volunteer centres for the second half of 2022. We doubled that for last year and that is going into next year as well, 2024. In essence, this allows us to put community workers on the ground who are already going into a structure of the local development companies under SICAP. SICAP is a well-established programme with 600 community workers around the country who had already been working in this space of people looking for protection. They were in a very good place and it was a very easy and quick plug-in to give SICAP additional funding.

The learning is ongoing. We have contact with the community response forums as well in terms of the issues that are coming up. They also feed back to other central government Departments in terms of GP services, education needs, and so on and so forth. The model is good but the struggle at the moment is accommodation, and that continues to be the case. That is the number one learning across government, that we need to build up our surge capacity, for want of a better term, to be able to cope with unexpected large inflows of people.