Shane Curley (Fianna Fail)

Imagine being a five-year-old in the town of Hostomel at the start of the war in Ukraine. One morning, the war reaches your door. Members of the Russian army burst in, occupy your house for weeks and you and your parents are forced to live in the basement, feeding off scraps until finally you are moved to Ireland, where you are welcomed into the town of Kinvara and the Merriman Hotel. You go to the local school and you make great friends. You engage with a speech and language therapist because you are so traumatised that you have been left with a stammer. You join the local orchestra in Gort and develop a network of friends. You have a support network around you, and you feel at home. You have been made to feel welcome in your community. Then, all of a sudden, a few months ago, you are told that you need to be moved out of the Merriman Hotel and will be moved west of Galway city to the Connemara Coast Hotel. Something does not add up in the system when people move to our country to be looked after, only for two Government agencies to fail to work in tandem and for one of them to decide that it needs to move people out in order to house other refugees who, very legitimately, need to be housed in our country. There is a breakdown in communications there.

I would also like to support Senator Rabbitte. I grew up in Loughrea. When I was four years old, people came to our door fundraising for a swimming pool. Thirty years later, there is still no pool in the town. One of the major issues we have, and I would like the Minister to come to the House to discuss it, is that only towns with populations of 10,000 or more are entitled to Government funding for swimming pools under the national planning framework. That needs to be changed. We have a lake in Loughrea. Unfortunately, over the years, there have been tragic drownings there. Any town in Ireland the size of Loughrea, whose population is approaching 7,000, deserves a swimming pool. By the time a swimming pool is built, there will be 10,000 people in the town. That is a given. It is going to take two or three years to get this over the line, and the population of Loughrea is constantly rising. It is something we need to do urgently.