Mr. Ger Deering:

I do not have the solutions to that. The bigger problem here is the housing issue because, in an ideal world, what those people should be doing is moving on. I understand the difficult that IPAS has. It has 5,600 people now who have status and who are in centres. Instead of having people in tents on the streets in Dublin, we should be able to move these people into the centres that were designed for international protection applicants but the problem is we do not appear to have places for the people in those centres to move on. For me, the solution is not really keeping people in the centres. It is devising a system of housing and integration into the community. The difficulty we have is, because housing is so scarce, this could be presented as competing with other local people whereas the people coming out of the centres, as the Cathaoirleach says, have been integrated into schools and into jobs and they are part of the community. We have to find a way to keep them in the community but I do not see keeping them in the IPAS centre as the solution.