Hundreds of refugees arriving in Ireland despite warnings over accommodation crisis

A further 1,200 Ukrainian refugees arrived in the State last week as warnings about an acute accommodation shortage failed to deter people seeking to flee after the Russian invasion.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice said a total of 55,829 Ukrainians had arrived in Ireland between the start of the war in late February and last Thursday, an increase of 1,228 on the previous week. However, a source said that about 170 refugees arrived at an accommodation facility in Citywest, Dublin between Friday and Saturday, a lower figure than those recorded on recent weekends.

It is understood that Department of Children modelling suggests that up to 61,000 refugees may need to be accommodated by the State by the end of December, although this modelling is dependent on the number of arrivals which is open to fluctuation.

The Government is coming under pressure to find accommodation for Ukrainian refugees and international protection applicants and has warned that some could end up sleeping on the streets due to the accommodation shortage.

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Ukrainian ambassador to Ireland Larysa Gerasko said this weekend that she had asked Ukrainians planning to come to Ireland to consider going elsewhere. “We shared on Ukrainian media and our social media the information that the Irish Government cannot guarantee accommodation for Ukrainians because of lack or absence of such accommodation.”

Huge influxes

Minister of State Patrick O’Donovan on Sunday defended the Government’s handling of the situation, saying 60,000 refugees, equivalent to more than 1 per cent of the population, had arrived in Ireland since February.

“We’re not the only European country that are experiencing huge influxes of this nature,” he told RTÉ’s The Week In Politics. “I don’t think anybody saw seven million people moving out of Ukraine last February. And it isn’t only Ireland, Belgium is under serious pressure. The Netherlands are under pressure, all the Baltic countries and eastern Europe.”

The Government on Sunday said that a contract to deliver the first 500 modular homes for those fleeing the war would be completed early next year.

After about 350 refugees last week were told they would need to leave a hotel in Santry, Dublin, where they had been staying for months, as a Government contract was coming to an end, Paul Gallagher, a hotelier speaking on behalf of the Irish Hotels’ Federation, said hosting Ukrainians “is not a very profitable business”.

“Many hotels who have done it did so because we came out of the Covid and would have had no idea how the market would be, so nobody would have any idea that tourism would have rebounded as strongly as it has done,” he told This Week on RTÉ Radio.

“Hotels are not designed long term to house people in living circumstances. Living in a hotel room for six months or 12 months is not what a hotel was designed to accommodate.”