Malcolm Noonan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth is leading the initial humanitarian response, including providing immediate and short-term accommodation for persons arriving in Ireland from the conflict in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, my Department is focusing on the longer-term accommodation challenges and is leading cross-Government efforts through a housing task force established by the Government for this purpose. All accommodation and housing options are being examined by the task force. These include the medium-term delivery of modular and volumetric accommodation, refurbishing or reconfiguring vacant buildings and stimulating and accelerating construction of new permanent-build homes. The Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, recently brought proposals to the Government for approval in this regard. These proposals include establishing an emergency vacant housing delivery unit in the Local Government Management Agency to support refurbishment of vacant buildings, assigning a director of service and a small team to co-ordinate the local response between agencies and community groups supporting the provision of services to Ukrainians, requesting each local authority to scope the refurbishment of at least one building capable of accommodating multiple families in their area and establishing a clearing house to resolve issues associated with planning permissions granted but not yet activated - these could be infrastructural issues such as water and wastewater.

Further options will be brought to the Government in the coming weeks and will be developed.

I refer to issues around emergency beds in each local authority area as well. Certainly in my local authority area, there is quite a considerable amount of activity and the local authority is being very proactive in trying to deliver both the emergency shorter-term options and longer-term ones.

To reassure the Deputy, this is working in parallel with Housing for All. We are quite clear that the Housing for All targets will be delivered as well in tandem with this, which is an immense humanitarian challenge right across Europe. The Government is determined to play a critical role in trying to support these families fleeing this terrible situation.

See this speech in context