Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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97. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform if he will ensure that public funds are made available for the additional public services posts and resources needed to meet the needs of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Ireland during 2022; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [20848/22]

Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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Ireland, with our EU partners, is committed to helping Ukraine and its people. This includes providing necessary funds to meet the costs of providing for Ukrainian refugees arriving to Ireland. There is a whole of government approach in place to coordinate the necessary humanitarian response in order to make provision for the necessary accommodation, social protection supports, health and other public services.

The level of public funds required to meet the cost of this response is expected to be significant. It is difficult at this point to estimate accurately how much additional funding will be required to provide the resources to meet the needs of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Ireland. We are still an early stage of people movement into Ireland and the possible range of Ukrainian arrivals is quite large, the overall demographic profile and needs of potential arrivals can only be estimated at this point and accommodation solutions found will impact considerably on the overall costs.

For 2022, where costs of the humanitarian provision for Ukrainian arrivals to Ireland cannot be met by Departments through re-prioritisation of existing resources, it is intended that funding required would in the first instance be met from the remaining €2½ billion in uncommitted Contingency reserve funds. However, there are also demands for additional Covid related expenditure that may arise later in the year depending on the situation with the virus. The actual level of funding that will need to be allocated this year will be reviewed throughout the year as work continues across Departments to understand the full cost implications of the crisis.

In respect of future years, a contingency provision of €3 billion for next year has been included in the draft Stability Programme Update to meet continued costs of providing supports for Ukrainian arrivals to Ireland. As it is too early at this stage to estimate the time horizon for which supports will be required, future years will be revised as more information becomes available.