Mr. Peter Tyndall:

The issue around consultation is a challenging one. If one can engage with opinion-formers in the community of the kind the Senator described, and get the generosity of spirit he described in Ballaghaderreen, those things can make an enormous difference to how things are accepted. Putting a notice in the local paper is not the best way of doing consultation. Consultation has to be nuanced and well thought through.

I largely agree on the point about putting large numbers of people into a small community. It is often not going to work. Many of the hotels and so on that became available to the Department were ones that were not commercially viable as hotels and were in the kind of situations where they were not ideal for accommodating large numbers of people seeking protection. In some ways, the system had its own issues.

I will ask Mr. Garvey to comment on the issue around allocation of housing to people who are refugees being accommodated from the EROC centres. The arrangement was made that each local authority would provide a certain number of properties. In the early days that caused a problem in that people were assigned to a local authority when they moved into the centre. If one local authority was able to house a number of people, people were being housed out of order. That led to a lot of misunderstanding and resentment and we intervened.

I take the general point that if it is possible, and I do not know whether it will be or not, to accommodate more than one person or family from a particular country in a certain locality, it will make it easier for them to settle in. Perhaps Mr. Garvey could talk about the particular situation.