Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

As I said, I have no issue with the fact that we had to react quickly. The communities, the organisations and the voluntary and community organisations acted really quickly. In some cases, they acted quicker than the State. This is because the State did not notice that, for example in my constituency, upwards of 70 Ukrainian refugees came into the community. The local organisations were not informed. Yet, they went in, they did the work and they stood up.

When the Minister says that 600 community development workers have been freed from their core work, that means that their core work is not being done. That is my point. We need a medium-term and a long-term strategy to deal with this refugee crisis, because there will be possibly upwards of 200,000 people. The strategy should also deal with how we continue to support the core work of those 600 community development workers. They were not sitting around, twiddling their thumbs before this. They were doing valuable work in our communities. That work cannot be disturbed, lost or put aside for a number of weeks or months. This work needs to be done, and it needs to be done at the same time as we support Ukrainian refugees.

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