860 homes pledged to Red Cross now ready for Ukrainian refugees

Irish Red Cross volunteers assisting Ukrainian refugees arriving at Shannon Airport. Picture: Brendan Gleeson

Some 860 properties pledged to the Irish Red Cross (IRC) have now been cleared by the Defence Forces as ready to be handed over to the Government to house Ukrainian refugees arriving in Ireland.

Around 24,000 pledges have been made to the IRC from people offering vacant properties, or to share their own homes, with more than 20,000 refugees having already arrived from Ukraine.

Ireland expects to take in at least 68,000 people from Ukraine, although some Government ministers have said the number could be closer to 200,000.

Delays

However, the necessary steps in the process of vetting accommodation offered, to ensure dignity and safety for refugees, coupled with the huge number of pledges, have led to delays in getting Ukrainian refugees into pledged homes.

The IRC has already made contact with 5,700 vacant property owners about their pledges, and 7,000 people who pledged shared accommodation.

A spokesperson for the IRC told the Irish Examiner that the final 1,000 vacant home pledges will be contacted on Wednesday and Thursday, while calls to those who offered shared accommodation are ongoing since last Friday, and are “well underway”.

A pilot project will begin on Thursday to test and streamline the Garda vetting process for those who have pledged shared accommodation. Once that process has been tested, Garda vetting will be rolled out to all who have made pledges from the start of next week.

Charlie Lampson, head of fundraising with the IRC, told RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne on Tuesday that they have faced a “huge and rapid” upscaling of their pledging programme, which previously received in the order of a few hundred pledges for support following crises in Syria and Afghanistan.

'Challenging situation'

Mr Lampson said that it has been a “challenging situation” with “a few wrinkles along the way” in terms of processing pledges.

“I'm going to ask people to bear with us,” he said, adding that the IRC hopes to make contact with all 24,000 people who have offered accommodation by the end of next week.

My Lampson said that the IRC has not been able to “get through” to around 3,000 people, although another IRC spokesperson said that they have been having some success with follow-up calls.

The IRC has enlisted the support of the Defence Forces to assist with calls to those who have pledged accommodation and is looking to co-ordinate with a number of private agencies and the State to make the process as efficient as possible.

The IRC has confirmed that the Defence Forces and private call centres have already increased their workforce by 75% in the current phase of pledge processing.

Mr Lampson recognised that people are dealing with a wait for accommodation pledges, but said that they are “we are working to get them as quickly as possible”.

“We are getting there as quickly as we can. There's a balance we have to do between speed and making sure that it's done right,” he said.