Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I think we are mixing two issues here. The repatriation efforts were primarily for people who reside in Ireland and were away. They might have been students, people working away temporarily or people on holidays.

There were a number of people who had been away for quite some time and felt the need to come home for health reasons. I can give the Deputy all the figures and data about where those people came from and what we spent and so on. We generally did not pay for flights, apart obviously from the ones we chartered. Most of the time, people were happy to pay for their own flights to get home, as long as they could get a seat, and we often negotiated with airlines to make sure that the cost for those people to get home was reasonable. There were, of course, some circumstances where people needed financial support from embassies abroad and we gave the flexibility to ambassadors to be able to use their good sense to do that.

On the issue of migrants who had been away for a long time coming home, that is something I would happily talk to the Deputy about when we have a bit more time. We have done a lot of work on some of the issues the Deputy has raised, particularly for people coming home from the US.

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