Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We are confident that we will be able to provide that State accommodation for the 90 initial days to give people who come here from Ukraine a chance to establish themselves and a chance to find their own accommodation and their own employment - whatever they can manage to do. Some of that accommodation already exists across the system. As I mentioned already, people from Ukraine who have moved into State accommodation do not always stay there. Some have moved on to find their own accommodation while others have moved on to other parts of the European Union, so accommodation does become free in the existing former hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. We also have the modular homes which the Office of Public Works is building and the refurbishment programme, which is taking old buildings and bringing them back into use as accommodation. All of that will continue. We have already managed to find accommodation for over 70,000 Ukrainians. Some of that will be the same accommodation, as people move out, but we will, of course, need to source additional accommodation as we have done for the past two years. In a crisis situation like this, I appreciate that the perfect is the enemy of the good. We need to use any accommodation that we can find. In many cases, it will be former hotels, former bed and breakfast accommodation and refurbished buildings.

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