Colm Brophy (Dublin South West, Fine Gael)

I assure the Deputy, as I did in my initial reply, that this is what we are doing. We fully recognise that we went through a period where we had an effective emergency. We had a massive surge in numbers and we had to respond to those on a humanitarian basis and to provide emergency accommodation as necessary. The operation that the Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, and I have been working on, literally day and night since we came into office, is to ensure we put in place an IPAS system that is fit for purpose, delivers value for money for the taxpayer, is based on moving towards State ownership of facilities rather than commercial contracting, and takes into account impacts on communities and local people. We also want to meet our key central requirement, which is to provide the accommodation that is needed, as we are obliged to do under our international obligations. In the context of doing all of that and in the context of renewing the contracts as they fall due, we are very much aware of the need to have an even spread, to look at how impacted communities are by location and to take that into account in all future decisions we make. Overall, the way of dealing with this is to bring down the numbers, which will bring down the need for the centres.

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