Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Then I will endeavour not to waste it. That is the lens I am bringing to the Ukrainian crisis that is unfolding at the moment, the scale of which is shocking. The total number of refugees fleeing Ukraine reached 2 million people this week. More than 1 million people arrived into Poland, almost 500,000 into Romania and more than 100,000 into both Hungary and Slovakia, the four EU neighbours bordering Ukraine to the west.

We have seen some arrive in Ireland but not yet in the numbers we expect. The words of the EU Home Affairs Commissioner, Ylva Johansson, at the European Parliament were very stark: "More is to come. Worse is to come. Millions more will flee and we must welcome them."

This is a scale of movement we have not see on the Continent of Europe in some 75 years. It is hard to fathom. The United Nations has described the movement from Ukraine as one of the fastest exoduses of modern times. Putin's attack on a peaceful democratic country has set in train a historic wave of migration that will scar the individual family histories of millions of individuals and families in coming years.

Of the 2 million who have already left and sought safety in the EU, an estimated 800,000 are children. They have crossed the border bundled onto trains, buses, into cars and on foot, some with mobile phone numbers scrawled on the back of their hands and clutching plastic bags. Yesterday, the Irish Red Cross had received more than 6,000 pledges of accommodation for Ukrainians in people's own homes. We have a generosity of spirit in this nation. We must bring it to bear to provide sanctuary and solace to those leaving their homes behind for now.

The Government response to date has been swift and significant. The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, has announced a specialised unit will be put in place to meet refugees from Ukraine as they arrive in at airports and ports in Ireland. I also welcome the Minister for Social Protection's commitment that her officials are working to give PPS numbers swiftly to Ukrainian refugees when they arrive to allow them to access services, supports and enable access to the labour market here.

However, as I said, it is the lens of the primary school teacher that I bring to this debate. Based on a back of an envelope calculation, if we are estimating that 100,000 people are going to arrive here, some 50,000 are likely to be children. That translates to 2,000 classrooms. That is just the physical built infrastructure. It also has to translate into 2,000 additional teachers, at a minimum, as well as all the supports that need to go into place. These will be deeply traumatised children. They will need the psychological supports. That is not the Minister of State's brief. They will need considerable language inputs. They will arrive here, presumably, with very little English. And then there are all the extra supports that we would just expect for schoolgoing children of that age. We also need to have a sense of where the demand will be geographically.

We also need to have a broader conversation about the best way to deliver a curriculum to these children. Do we anticipate they will be here in five and ten years? In that case we should absolutely integrate them and fold them into the Irish curriculum. Or do we think they will be here for a shorter period? Should we be looking at ways to deliver something that is closer to the Ukrainian curriculum? Should we be looking at trying to get resources to deliver it, or at least some of it, in Ukrainian to minimise the disruption to these children's education or should we be trying to create a stepping stone between those two things whereby we say we will deal with their specific needs now but try to scaffold them into an Irish system in the longer term? These are questions and that is how I pose them. There is a huge job of work to be done and it needs to be done extremely quickly.

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