Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 17 May 2022

Joint Committee On Children, Equality, Disability, Integration And Youth

Ukrainian Crisis: Discussion

Mr. Liam O'Dwyer:

The Ukraine Centre in Vicar Street, ironically enough, is very helpful in that regard. Having discussed it with the Ukrainian group themselves, they identified this a couple of weeks ago to us, very forcibly actually, with the number of people they are coming across within their own community. None of them are staff but their own volunteers were actually quite traumatised by the experiences of listening to some of their fellow country people. Our psychosocial team will be there at Vicar Street, hopefully every day, and we have also agreed that our psychosocial team will train some of the Ukrainian volunteers. We also are being supported by a group of therapists who are meeting next week to begin thinking about how they can make available therapy counselling to Ukrainians. The Red Cross is happy to fund that. It is not within our expertise and it is not an area we would have any capacity in. We do have experience with the psychosocial service but not with therapy. That is something that will be developed, I hope next week.