Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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1868.To ask the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth the number of beds currently available in the IPAS system. [32694/24]

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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As of 14 July, there are more than 31,000 people accommodated in the International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS) system as a whole (of whom 8,112 are children) compared with approximately 8,700 people at the end of February 2022.

The Department of Integration has increased IPAS capacity by more than 400% since 2020, from just under 7,000 people on 31 December 2020 to presently more than 31,000.

The Department does not collate current vacant beds due to the variable nature of the data which changes on an hourly basis. I can update the Deputy that the usable capacity available in the system over the last number of weeks has ranged between approximately 200 and 500 beds across 309 centres. These beds are required to ensure accommodation is available for newly arriving families. This equates to approximately 8 days of arriving international protection applicants.

IPAS continues to make every effort to maximise bed usage across its system. Where beds are not being utilised this can be for a number of reasons and includes family configuration, contract management issues, capacity to support triage and reception processes in circumstances where there is very limited line of sight on new accommodation for single male applicants, and spaces reserved for the accommodation of families and children arriving in the coming days.

The Department engages intensively and proactively on a continuing basis with providers of contracted accommodation to identify any available bed spaces at these locations. A programme of in person inspections of centres is also carried out which includes checks to ensure bed usage is maximised.

These processes are in place to ensure every available bed within the IPAS portfolio is available to accommodate arriving international protection applicants.

(IPAS) releases weekly statistics in relation to international protection (IP) applicants. This includes a per county breakdown of where IP applicants are residing. These statistics are located on the Gov.ie website: