Fiona O'Loughlin (Kildare South, Fianna Fail)
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1001. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the local authorities that have and have not appointed an officer with responsibility for migrant integration, respectively; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [12188/18]

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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Under section 159 of the Local Government Act 2001, each Chief Executive is responsible for staffing and organization arrangements necessary for carrying out the functions of the local authorities for which he or she is responsible. In this regard, the assignment of local authority staff to a particular function, such as migrant integration, is a matter for the Chief Executive.

My Department is responsible for workforce planning for the local government sector, including monitoring of local government sector employment levels. To this end, my Department gathers quarterly data on staff numbers in local authorities; however, the data gathered does not provide details in terms of the number of officers with responsibility for migrant integration employed nationally by local authorities. Accordingly, the information requested is not available in my Department.

However, since 2017, my Department has received two staffing sanction requests for Resettlement Support Workers, one from Galway County Council and one from Waterford City & County Council. My Department has approved sanction for both of these requests.