Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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I will take that point on the importance of communication on board and reflect on it. It is important. There are lots of Departments and State agencies all acting and we recall from Covid that it can be hard to bring everything together in a digestible format. There are Ukrainians in every constituency around the country but the concentrations of displaced persons are higher in certain parts of the country than others as Deputy Cathal Crowe spoke about earlier.

The Deputy's point about vacant properties is very important. About three weeks ago, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage brought forward proposals to make it easier to avail of funding to refurbish and rehabilitate vacant properties not necessarily for displaced persons from Ukraine but as part of the effort to generally broaden the supply of housing in the country. He would probably be better placed to go into that initiative in more detail but we did agree on that at Cabinet. With schemes such as Town Centre First, I think everyone agrees that there are large amounts of vacant accommodation in the country and anything we can do to make it available to people is positive.