That some recently arrived asylum seekers in the State have been sleeping rough due to a shortage of facilities raises serious and urgent questions. The Department of Integration said accommodation available to it “reached capacity” last week as a result of the “sustained high number of people” seeking assistance. That forced officials to prioritise applicants with “specific vulnerabilities”, the department said.
There is no doubt that the State has been under immense pressure in its efforts to house asylum seekers and refugees in recent months. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the authorities were struggling to source enough accommodation for newly arrived asylum seekers partly because the housing crisis was making it impossible for many of those who had been granted protection status to find somewhere to live.
The Government was correct to drop visa requirements for Ukrainians when the war broke out, but a long-term failure to plan for sudden spikes in the inward flow has meant that the existing system is now, in the words of the Government officials themselves, at “breaking point”.
Quite remarkably, meanwhile, latest figures show that 85 per cent of properties pledged for use by Ukrainian refugees and given to local authorities to fill have not yet been opened. Last Wednesday, charities were scrambling to find beds for 130 asylum seekers who had not been offered a place to stay by the State itself.
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The immediate challenge is to ensure that beds can be found for new asylum seekers and refugees – vulnerable groups by definition – as a matter of priority. Emergency accommodation for up to 200 people at the Sports Ireland campus in Abbotstown in Dublin will certainly help.
But a concurrent challenge is to develop longer term accommodation capacity with flexibility to respond to increasingly common fluctuations in the numbers of new arrivals. Ireland has international obligations in relation to the welfare of asylum seekers; urgent steps are required to ensure the State can meet those obligations.