Ms Celine Kennelly:

Sure, no problem.

It is correct to say the Irish communities are broadly centred in urban areas. We are lucky, in terms of the membership of the coalition, that we too are generally based in urban areas, so we are very much at the coalface of our communities and can support them in that regard. The centres have a broader remit. In recent years, certainly in California, in economic terms a lot of our community have moved out of cities because of inflation and rising housing prices and education costs to further flung areas outside of, for example, my city, San Francisco. All the centres are continuing to provide services to those immigrants. In our case, we deal with west of the Rocky Mountains, while the Chicago centre comes down the middle through Texas, and the centres on the eastern coast come all the way down the eastern seaboard. We are making sure any immigrant who is looking for a service and assistance can get it.

One issue we saw earlier during the Covid pandemic, which touches on the question as to the difference between the undocumented and the documented population, relates to the number of people who were in the US as part of inter-company transfers on work visas, where the visas had expired and they were unable to return to Ireland to renew them. The US embassy in Dublin was closed and they, effectively, became trapped within the US. Quite a number of people decided this life was not for them, because they were used to-----