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

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this issue. I want to give Deputies some reassurance. The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, and his Department, have done an heroic job over the past 12 months. It has not been easy. They have been put under enormous pressure. Nobody anticipated what has unfolded over the past 12 months. We have managed to accommodate the vast majority of refugees who have come from Ukraine in homes, hotels, hostels and good quality accommodation. That is not to deny that some of the accommodation is not good enough and we have to work on that.

The numbers are going to keep coming. This war is not going to get better anytime soon. In fact, it will probably get a lot worse before it gets better, tragically. That has the potential to drive a new wave of predominantly women and children who are fleeing for their own safety. We need to respond to that as a State. We need to explain to our people why it is happening. We need to work with them by communicating with communities. My Department is working to try to ensure that anybody who has come here from Ukraine and wants to work can do so. I want to ensure that entrepreneurs who may have been successful in Ukraine can also be successful entrepreneurs here. We are providing training programmes to allow for that.

Accommodation is the real pressure point. The reason I responded to the accusation that was made earlier was because I want to reassure people that this is an all-of-government effort. It is not the case that one Minister and Department are left to hold all the responsibility. We have offered office space in the centre of Dublin. We will take out our people to create space to assist in the collective effort that is needed to provide more space in city centre locations, as well as other locations, for temporary accommodation for people seeking international protection.

The truth is that Ireland has never faced a challenge of this scale to accommodate international protection applicants and the human outflow of the war in Ukraine. That challenge is likely to persist for some time. That is why we have a specific subcommittee group that meets, and will meet regularly into the future, to ensure we are using all of the infrastructure available to us. We are also creating new infrastructure where and when it is appropriate.

I take the point about better communication. Quite simply, the State does not have time to seek permission from communities to accommodate Ukrainian families and other international protection applicants. However, that does not mean we cannot communicate better than we have done in order to demystify some of the accusations that are being made, to deal with some of the myths that are out there and to reassure people that the system that is in place can assist local communities and the vulnerable people who come to our shores. I look forward to future debates on this challenge because it is not going to go away anytime soon. Unlike most parliaments around Europe, the vast majority of sentiment and contribution in this Parliament is moving in the same direction.

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