New campaign calls on Irish households to pledge a bed to Syrian refugee

A national campaign calling on Irish homeowners to pledge a bed or an empty home to Syrian refugees has been launched.

The Irish Red Cross wants people to consider offering a spare bedroom to a Syrian refugee to use for up to a year.

The charity is also calling for the owners of vacant, standalone properties – including apartments, houses and converted accommodation –to offer the space to a refugee family.

The Irish Red Cross said any refugee housed through the register would be paired with a caseworker and provided with educational, health and employment support.

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Once the refugee is placed in the accommodation their name will be put on the local authority housing list so that when a home becomes available, they can move into a longer-term living arrangement, the charity said.

The latest campaign follows advocacy group Uplift’s 2015 “pledge a bed” campaign which resulted in more than 830 offers of accommodation, goods and services. The Irish Red Cross was chosen by the Government to manage the register of pledges and vet those who had offered spaces. However, it took more than two years for the first group of refugees to be housed in early 2017.

Pledged accommodation

Some 88 refugees have been housed through the 2015 campaign. Of these 58 people were placed in pledged accommodation, 24 were placed in private rental homes and six were placed in social housing through a collaboration with Co-operative Housing Ireland.

In 2015 the Government committed to welcoming 4,000 refugees and asylum seekers from Greece, Lebanon and Italy as part of the Irish Refugee Protection Programme. To date, 1,814 refugees have arrived in Ireland under the resettlement and relocation strands of the programme.

A total of 1,022 refugees predominantly from Syria, but also from Iraq and Libya, had arrived in Ireland from Greece by the end of April. Some 792 Syrian and Iraqi refugees have arrived in Ireland from Lebanon. To date no asylum seekers have arrived from Italy under the programme. The Government has said it will resettle an additional 600 refugees per year for 2018 and 2019.