Department 'getting better value now' on accommodation for asylum seekers, PAC told
Secretary general at the Department of Justice, Oonagh McPhillips, said: 'The prices paid from 2022 onwards, we wouldn’t expect to pay those prices again.' File photo: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie
The Department of Justice insists it is getting “better value for money” from its spending on accommodation for asylum seekers — but cannot quantify to what extent that is the case.
Secretary general of the department, Oonagh McPhillips, told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee that the department is achieving a greater return on international protection accommodation in 2025 than it was in 2022, when the system came under intense pressure by housing asylum seekers and refugees from the war in Ukraine.
“It was certainly very expensive accommodation,” Ms McPhillips said of the contracts entered into from 2022 onwards. “There was a crisis, and it coincided with the crisis in Ukraine and pressure on the housing market also,” she said.
“The prices paid from 2022 onwards, we wouldn’t expect to pay those prices again,” she said.
Asked how much of a loss the State would have made above market value due to the exorbitant nature of those contracts, Ms McPhillips repeatedly declined to answer definitively, saying she “couldn’t put a number on it”.
She said:
The secretary general said, however, that the total expected expenditure on IPAS for 2025 will be €1.2bn, an increase on the just under €1.1bn spent last year.
There were nearly 33,000 international protection applicants living in State-operated accommodation at the end of 2024, with about 75% of those people living in emergency accommodation.
More than 90% of the €1.1bn paid out last year went to commercial providers, with some longstanding vendors having been paid hundreds of millions of euros for that service over the past 15 years.
Earlier this month, the reported that the average cost to accommodate asylum seekers per person per night in Ireland stood at €84, with Kildare's average equivalent outlay of €92 per night making it the most expensive county.
David Delaney, the department’s head of international protection, said that figure has now fallen to €71, though it varies considerably from county to county, and between rural and urban settings.
He said the department now uses a “rate card” to provide certainty for officials to “allow them to negotiate on a robust basis” when attempting to secure new accommodation.
The hearing came at a fraught time for the system with a series of violent protests having taken place outside the IPAS centre in Citywest in Dublin on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
The assembled officials from the department faced questioning on the efficacy of administration of the IPAS system following an introductory statement by the Comptroller and Auditor General Seamus McCarthy, who underlined that in his review of the contracts underpinning the system “due diligence records were significantly incomplete” on the part of the State.
Mr McCarthy said evidence of planning permissions and fire and insurance certificates for IPAS accommodation were not available for the majority of the properties inspected by his office, while “actual signed contracts were available for just half of the sample properties reviewed”.
He added that, of a €7.4m overpayment of VAT to one accommodation supplier dating from 2023, just €1.5m has been returned to date.
This assertion was disputed by Mr Delaney who said that of the €7.4m outstanding, only €1.9m of that figure was owed to the Department of Justice, and that amount has now been refunded in full.
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