UN tells Government to improve conditions for incoming refugees

Bedding at the Gormanstown army camp in Co Meath. Picture: Government Information Services 

The Government has been told by the United Nations Refugee Agency that it must take swift action to ensure refugees have accommodation that offers basic levels of safety and dignity. 

Agencies working with refugees from Ukraine, Afghanistan, and other areas of conflict have also raised concern that thousands of rooms, currently occupied by refugees in student accommodation buildings, will be lost again from next month when third-level colleges begin to reopen.

Currently, there are 4,250 student accommodation places being used across the country for Ukrainians arriving here, according to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.

Interim chief executive of NASC migrant rights centre in Cork, Fiona Hurley, said: “We are quite concerned about what happens at the end of August when the students come back. 

That will be another huge issue coming up. It will be very difficult to go from that to living in camp beds.” 

Taoiseach Micheál Martin said there has been an increase in applications for international protection in Ireland since Britain introduced a policy of deporting refugees to Rwanda.

Accommodation at Dublin's Citywest campus has reached its limit, with tented accommodation now being put in place there and in Gormanstown army camp in Co Meath.

Gormanstown camp

Head of the UN High Commission on Refugees in Ireland Enda O’Neill said: “It is becoming increasingly clear that the current approach of contracting accommodation from the private sector has reached its limits. 

"Significant investment is now required by the Government to ensure that it has the capacity to meet the immediate need for the shelter of new arrivals and to provide safeguards for the protection of children and other categories of vulnerable people.” 

The national co-ordinator for the Ukraine Civil Society Forum, Emma Lane-Spollen, said: “The crisis in Citywest will happen again if we don’t do something new. 

Refugees from the Ukraine outside the CityWest Hotel where they are being temporrily accomodated. Picture: Moya Nolan

We need the big decisions to be made now. A new agency, a national lead, and a thought-through plan. We have to move from crisis mode to get on top of the situation.” 

Recent arrivals to Ireland, Tapan Dutta, his wife Olga, and their three sons, aged from seven months to eight years, are currently living in one room at the Hotel Ibis off the Red Cow Roundabout in Dublin. 

Tapan is working in a service station and has been trying to find accommodation for his family since they arrived here on April 6 from their home city, Cherkasy in Ukraine.

“We are trying to find somewhere to live but we can’t," he said. "It is a very small room for five people.” 

Brian Killoran of the Irish Immigrant Council has warned that the focus needs to be on how the country treats the situation in the medium- to long-term.

"We can’t be 12 months down the road still treating it as an emergency situation," he said. 

We need to be moving people through options and getting them to some semblance of normality and living a life of dignity again.” 

Despite comments from the Taoiseach, Mr Killoran said the effect of the UK’s deportation policy on the numbers arriving in Ireland is “at the stage of speculation”.

“A more visibly hostile migration environment in the UK could very well have an impact here, but the evidence of that yet is very anecdotal,” he said.