Irish Red Cross grapples with ‘enormous’ Ukraine refugee crisis

As Irish Red Cross general secretary Liam O'Dwyer was wrapping up work at the charity's Merrion Square office on a recent Saturday evening, an older woman called to the door looking to make a donation.

The woman wanted to donate money to help support the thousands of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine who were coming to Ireland.

“I said, ‘What will I make the receipt out for?’ And she said €20,000. That’s the generosity that’s going on at the moment” O’Dwyer says.

Since the war in Ukraine started in late February, the humanitarian charity has raised more than €30 million in donations and has been at the centre of efforts to house refugees in spare homes or rooms offered up by the public.

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The hallway of the charity’s Dublin city centre office is lined with stacks of basic supplies for refugees, such as boxes of shaving foam and shower gel.

The intensity of the last eight weeks had been breathtaking and the scale of the challenge “enormous”, O’Dwyer told The Irish Times.

Having retired as head of the Irish Red Cross in 2020, O’Dwyer had been focusing on spending time with his family and playing tennis, before the charity asked him to come back on a part-time basis last November.

“Then this [invasion of Ukraine] happened” he says.

The Irish arm of the international charity has sent €5.2 million in donated funds to Red Cross branches working in the conflict zone and neighbouring countries, like Poland and Slovakia, and plans to send another €4 million soon.

This is being used to tackle the immediate humanitarian and refugee crisis, providing basic supplies like medicine, water, food and tents.

“You think the spending of the funds is easy, but it’s actually not,” O’Dwyer says. The charity receives lengthy lists of what donations have been spent on as it has to be accountable “down to the number of tents”, he says.

The charity plans to hold back half of the donated €30 million to be put towards rebuilding peoples’ lives in Ukraine when the war ends.

Another €2-€3 million has been earmarked to help the refugees arriving in Ireland, such as offering €100 vouchers for Dunnes Stores and Penneys for people to buy clothes and hygiene products.

24,000 pledges

The charity has received more than 24,000 pledges from the public offering empty homes or spare rooms to house Ukrainians. Previous schemes to house Syrian or Afghan refugees would have seen the charity dealing with offers in the hundreds, rather than thousands.

The flood of support has left the charity of 55 staff struggling to process the offers. “We’re coming under a lot of pressure and people are giving out about it, and they’re right it is slow, that’s simply the reality,” O’Dwyer says.

Previously, a Red Cross caseworker would inspect the offered property to check that it was in suitable condition, and spend time with both the refugee and property owner to make sure the match was right. “We can’t do that this time,” he says.

The Defence Forces and call centre staff have been tasked with contacting people who have offered accommodation, while local estate agents and members of Engineers Ireland have been carrying out the property inspections.

By the middle of this week more than 13,000 people who offered housing had been called, with everyone who pledged a home or room to be contacted by the end of next week.

The initial effort had focused on contacting the smaller number who had offered empty properties, before moving on to people who offered to put refugees up in a spare room in their home.

When a housing offer is deemed suitable and the property owner agrees to proceed, the Department of Equality then places an individual refugee or family in the home, with the help of local authorities.

“The general public don’t see the dance that has to happen, on the phone, with the assessment and then the actual placement . . . But it will move more quickly now,” the Irish Red Cross chief says.

At the moment the charity was finding that only about a third of the offers of vacant properties were materialising and suitable.

About one in 10 people contacted by phone said they had changed their minds about hosting refugees, while sometimes as many as 40 per cent were not answering calls despite repeated attempts, O’Dwyer says.

Some offers of empty properties were not suitable due to the house being in poor repair, or because of problems with electrical wiring or the boiler, he says.

While holiday homes in remote rural locations would not have been considered in previous pledge schemes, the Red Cross has found many Ukrainians are arriving in cars after having driven across Europe and come to Ireland by ferry. These families could potentially be housed in rural holiday homes, which would be preferable to sleeping on the floor of a hall or gym, he says.

Initially it was not expected host families would need to be Garda vetted, but that later changed for people offering rooms in a shared home to a family with children.

There are “concerns” about potential exploitation, O’Dwyer explained. “The issue is that there are so many women and children who have come here, we need to be very careful of that,” he says.

As Red Cross case workers were able to spend time with the smaller numbers of hosts offering to put people up in spare rooms previously, people with bad intentions could be “weeded out”, he says. To do that this time the charity would need upwards of 100 case workers, while in reality it had just six.

‘Couldn’t cope’

It is likely some placements where a host is sharing their home with refugees will break down. “Sometimes people have a way of living that doesn’t match on either side,” O’Dwyer says.

“I always remember one family with a Syrian lad and the Syrian lad was up half the night, and he was smoking and the family couldn’t cope with it,” he says.

In other cases Irish families had taken in young Syrian men who effectively became “their sons”, he adds.

In one reported incident in Tipperary, an informal arrangement where a woman offered a spare room to a Ukrainian mother and child broke down, after the host suspected the mother was engaging in sex work from the property.

O’Dwyer says he would not blame the incident on the “informal” nature of the arrangement. “These things are gonna happen, this is the largest group of people ever to come into this country,” he says.

No one wanted to see large numbers of Ukrainians sleeping in tents in emergency shelter facilities, he says. “At the same time we have to recognise that accommodation is beginning to come under real pressure at this stage,” he adds.

Kevin O'Leary (33) has worked with the Irish Red Cross for five years on several refugee housing schemes, and says it was apparent shortly after the Russian invasion began that Ireland would be dealing with "very large numbers" of refugees.

Earlier this week he helped settle one Ukrainian family and one Afghan family into properties offered by Irish hosts. “It’s going in, getting a few things signed, giving your contact details and giving breathing space, maybe touching in the next day,” he says.

Despite the huge numbers to be housed, the Irish Red Cross had a “duty of care” to both the refugee and property owner, to check back in and offer support if needed. Communication was key to a placement working out well, particularly in a shared home, O’Leary says.

“Not all accommodation is going to be suitable, but that offer of support is still recognised, it is still appreciated . . . I’ve never experienced such an overwhelming desire to support in whatever way possible, it’s incredible,” he says.