Mr. Liam O'Dwyer:

I have divided the statement into three. There are two short pieces at the start to put some perspective on it for everyone. There are three aspects to the work we are undertaking at the moment. The first is fundraising, which has delivered a huge amount of money - €33 million to date. We are amazed at that. We have a plan for how that is to be distributed. The first €9.2 million has already been sent to Ukraine for use there by the federation of Red Cross groupings and by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Later this week, in fact when we go back to the office, Mr. Carey will be signing a paper to send a further €2 million to the Ukrainian Red Cross and the Polish Red Cross. As well as that, we have committed €3 million for use in Ireland to support the refugees who are here. We are doing that with a voucher scheme. I think we have identified with the Ukrainian community some of the needs around clothes, shoes, hygiene products etc. We are also engaged in a number of community projects, including one with the Ukrainian community itself.

The supports we are offering are largely around the ports and airports where our members are stationed in a welcoming and signposting manner and giving whatever help they can. As Mr. Carey was saying earlier, we were talking to someone who told us that people are stopping because they are in need of petrol or diesel when they arrive at the ports. It is that sort of immediate help to enable people to get to the accommodation that is being provided here. As well as that, we are supporting accommodation needs like furniture, as well as IT equipment and transport, etc. We have set up a community centre with the Ukraine community. It is a joint project together in Vicar Street and that kicked off this week.

The register of pledges database and portal we have is probably of more interest. We were requested by the Government at the very start to activate the register of pledges to provide accommodation. We have been using this database for quite a number of years to support in particular the Syrian community when they came here and later the Afghan community when they came here as well. The database is used to receiving between 200 and 500 offers of accommodation. That is what it is set up to deliver. We were a little shocked at the beginning of March when we suddenly had 6,000 offers overnight. The system crashed and we had to spend a couple of days putting it back together, strengthening it and making it robust enough to deal with the volume that was coming our way, which has ended up at over 25,000 offers or accommodation.

There is also a register of services and goods. We have activated a project in relation to that as well because there are over 3,000 people who have volunteered to help with the Ukrainians coming here. In terms of something that might be useful later on, especially when Ukrainians move into shared accommodation, that is going to be an important piece. To manage the volume of activity, we took on about four or five staff and then we recruited the Defence Forces to help us with our call centre. We also brought in a professional call centre, SalesSense, and a number of voluntary people who were working at tech companies like Amazon, Web Summit and the like. They offered to make some of the initial telephone calls. After all those call centre staff and volunteers were trained, we began to make the calls to the pledgers. We have liaised the whole time with the Department of Children, Equality, Integration, Disability and Youth, which is the lead Department from our point of view. We have a joint controller agreement with it for the database. It is jointly managed and controlled from the point of view of using the data, which is important.

We began with the Defence Forces because they were the most robust when it came to numbers. They had two centres operating and at one stage they had over 40 people making the telephone calls. We focused on the over 6,700 vacant pledges. While they were doing that, the other call centres were looking at the shared pledges and making the initial calls about those. We also asked for support from Engineers Ireland and from the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers, IPAV. They have generously offered us over 300 engineers and auctioneers to follow up with the property assessments for the vacant pledges. The intention of that was just to be sure the house was adequate and there were no health and safety issues. We were not looking for any massive assessment. We designed the form with the help of Microsoft and TEKenable and we have the form now. It is on the iPhone and can be fed in and fed back then into the database, which has worked very well.

The agreed process was that the Defence Forces operator would call the person who had pledged to verify his or her information. I am constantly asked about pledges by the media. The difficulty with pledges arises because of the IT system. People often do not put in the correct details and they miss parts of it, so you have to go and interrogate it. Some of the delays that have been experienced have involved long telephone conversations to make certain the information in the database is correct and gives us the type of information you can use when you are placing somebody in the property. The idea was that a Defence Forces operator would talk to the each pledger, verify the information and seek his or her permission for an assessor to call. Then the Defence Forces member would call the assessor, put him in touch with the pledger and go on from there. That is how it operated. Our normal process is lengthy and Department officials, to be fair to them, were panicking because they were thinking they had to move on this because there was an urgency about it. They had a really good sense of the urgency and the need to move people in, so they asked us to do the assessments retrospectively and later to wait until all the pledgers of the vacant properties had been called and then to put the assessments in, which is what we have done. The Department then received the initial information from ourselves. It also looked for some additional fields which we put into the system. That gave the Department a better opportunity to place people in accommodation. We had noticed, going back to the veracity of the information in the system, that people had put in their houses as vacant houses but on full interrogation we noticed quite a number of those were actually shared accommodation as well. It is only when you pull it out of the system that you can see that. The work on the shared properties had begun and that was completed two weeks ago with the support of An Post. We brought in the An Post call centre to really drive this home to make certain everyone was called on time and all the initial calls had been made. A number of calls were made two or three times because people were not contactable, but I will come back to that again.

We were then asked, from a Garda vetting point of view, for details of shared properties where people aged under 18 years were going to be involved in placements. Members probably know from the numbers that a substantial number of women are here with their children. I think they account for two thirds of the people who have come. On that basis, the Government decided that Garda vetting was an essential feature. Again, we designed a process. We also looked for an application so it would be smooth and automatic to get the results into the Department so it could do the placing. We began that work about a month ago.

That work started fully, with people being phoned, at the beginning of May. Interestingly enough, the call centre staff were asking the pledgers if they were willing to be Garda vetted and the wonderful news was that over 97% of people said "Yes", which was a very positive feature of the process. We began at the start of May and we have a team of 50 volunteers and staff. We have been assisted by Scouting Ireland, which has expertise in the area that it has developed over years. We liaise on a weekly basis with the Garda vetting bureau and the first part of the process is to email the pledger looking to verify their details online. Essentially, we set up a Zoom call, the people join and we verify their data and that they are who they say they are. Once they do that we send the Garda vetting form, which they send to the Garda

That is when we lose control of the process because the people have 30 days to complete that form and send it in themselves. Those who have done it know it is not a straightforward form; that is the reality. To be fair, the Garda initially stated it would be done in seven days and then it was five days but, to be frank, they are doing it in two or three days. It is a very efficient process.

So far we have sent invitations to 1,300 households and just over 500 have engaged. That is an issue. There are 318 individuals who have had their Garda vetting completed. The issue with the pledges is that one might think it is a straightforward process and when the call is made, people will respond immediately. That is not what happens, unfortunately. The guts of 40% responded and more invitations must now be sent out again, which makes the process longer, and that is a pity.

Given the original register of pledges was not built for the volume of activity, we sat down with departmental personnel and Microsoft and we have produced a custom-built customer relationship management system to manage the data. It is fantastic and we are thrilled with it because it is giving us better information and it is more manageable. It is there for the future and it is giving us what we need now in quite a robust way. The portal is still there and it is and will remain the front face. It is excellent and this just gives us a reporting system.

From statistics, the core issues were duplicates, emergency pledges and people wanting to rent their property, which was not part of the arrangement. That takes the guts of 20% out of the picture. The duplicates came from what we have all seen when we are using an app; if something is not working we might press a button a number of times and end up applying a number of times. Withdrawals equate to 22%, which is the norm whenever we have done this with our friends from Syria and Afghanistan. The norm is always that type of number. In this case, it is somewhat unusual in one respect as a small percentage of people are withdrawing because they have already taken in refugees. They have done this informally. We have spent quite a bit of time working with a number of groups working in the informal sector, and to be fair that is working well.

The portion of people who were not contactable is 24%. These are people who have been called a number of times and they have not answered the phone for whatever reason. There are all sorts of reasons around that. We will be sending an email on Thursday to every one of those and we are offering an opportunity to come back to us on the phone. We have a freefone hotline and we are simply asking that if people are still in, they should call us. We have SalesSense, a call centre, ready for that now so we can capture as many of those offers as possible. The rest is with the Department. I have said from the start that if we got 33% we would be doing well. We are at 35% and I would say we will do better. We have had new pledges in the past ten days numbering at more than 300, which is encouraging to say the least.

That gives a sense of where we are with pledges. We are happy with progress to date. It is slow but statistics indicate the volume involved. There are two elements, which are the volume and the complexity of the arrangement on the phone. The volume is interesting because we have contacted a vast number of people. At this stage we have made over 40,000 calls and received 27,000 calls to our office, which is a huge volume of activity. That is apart from the nearly 8,000 emails and the other calls being made.

The next piece is obviously that the Department is busy with the placement of people. I am aware people might say the process is quite slow but it is actually a slow process because we are matching two sets of people. We must be careful that the right refugee is going in with the right host so that all the needs are met. It is complex, as we know from the past. We are matching people ourselves but sometimes there are elements like school, work or medical issues to be considered. We have a number of "aged out" minors, as they are called, or people who have just turned 18. We need to put them in carefully with a particular family. The different varieties of need must be weighed up when making the call.

That is what I wanted to say to the committee but we are delighted to take any questions.