Mr. David Delaney:

Just to go into some of the questions raised and to back up the point made by the Secretary General, we grew from 7,000 beds to 27,000 in the space of two years.

That was a very large amount of growth in a short space of time. The Deputy pointed to the EU and Irish legal obligations to accommodate people. The priority was to get beds and make sure that we had accommodation for everyone coming into the State.

In terms of competitive processes, we had a procurement process at the end of November 2022 to bring on board a sufficient amount of beds. That process did bring on a few thousand beds but, in the context of the surge we were experiencing at that point in time, that was not sufficient to meet the demand that existed in the system. We then moved to an expression of interest process where anyone who had available accommodation that met our needs at the time, met the planning and building regulation requirements and could accommodate people was accepted. Many of the providers the Deputy mentioned, which are the seven top providers of beds, would have come in through the majority of that process. They would have been assessed at that time, gone through a due diligence process and been identified as being appropriate to provide accommodation to asylum seekers then.

In terms of the process being fair and also providing value for money, I can point to the fact that we now have a very robust due diligence process. We require a Company Registration Office number for every company that applies for international protection accommodation. We use a Tailte Éireann mapping service to confirm the property in question. We also insist on tax clearance-----