Mr. Brian Killoran:

There has been some information of late on the poor levels of take-up of the vaccine among certain ethnic minority or nationality groups in Ireland. Our own organisation does a lot of work with grassroots migrant communities and, from what the leaders of those groups say to us, a lot of the issue is that because of the nature of the pandemic over the last two years, migrant communities have to a certain extent gone into a situation of relying upon themselves again because of the reduced levels of interaction, inability to go to work and inability to do normal things. Within that, the channels the people rely upon for information include social media and media channels, some of which come from their own home countries. In many of those home countries, there is a high level of vaccine scepticism but also a high level of vaccine disinformation. That needs to be looked at, analysed, and challenged. We need leaders from migrant communities to be empowered to engage with their own communities around those issues and get back to the situation where we can address some of the shortfall in that area.

On the real-world impact, Sr. Keenan and I touched upon this in our initial interventions. There is very little, if any, communication across Government Departments as regards what a person’s rights or entitlements are. The Department of Justice will issue somebody with immigration status but when the person goes to the social protection office, in some instances it is clear but if there is anything in question whatsoever, they will have to go through a very bureaucratic rigmarole with another Government Department to explain again what their immigration status is and what their rights and entitlements should be. There are numerous barriers. For example, somebody might be on a type of permission from the Department of Justice which is based on the Minister's discretion but does not fit into a clear category. If that person applies to get a SUSI grant because they want to go to third level education, SUSI can say it is not clear enough in terms of describing what the person’s immigration status is and, therefore, they do not qualify for the SUSI grant. We see this a lot with victims of trafficking. It is an example of that lack of communication. Each Government Department is siloed to a large extent and there needs to be co-ordination across Departments so as not to impede a person's integration. Sr. Keenan might want to add to that.