21,000 refugees have come to Ireland since the conflict began, with 13,000 of those in state provided accommodation.
Roderic O’Gorman has said that there have been no formal discussions about families receiving financial payments for hosting Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war.
The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth made the comments during On The Record on Newstalk on Sunday (10 April).
“There hasn’t been any discussion at cabinet level about that yet,” O’Gorman said.
“As you know, we’ve had an extensive number of people pledge either a shared room in their home or vacant accommodation they have for Ukrainian refugees, we’ve had about 20,000 [offers] in total of these.
“It’s a real manifestation of the generosity of the Irish people in responding to what we’re seeing happening over in Ukraine.
“This is very much a show of solidarity by Irish people.
“We haven’t made any commitment yet in terms of a financial support.
“Like all elements of our response to this crisis, we’ll continue to keep that element under review.”
O’Gorman said that there had been no formal discussions between Departments about the potential scheme.
21,000 refugees have come to Ireland since the conflict began, with 13,000 of those in state provided accommodation.
Cabinet was told that half of accommodation pledged by the public may not be available or suitable.
“I think we’ve had total over 21,000 offers of accommodation, either shared or vacant units,” O’Gorman said.
“Our Department, working closely with the Defence Forces, working closely with the Department of Social Protection, we’ve got significant support in terms of engaging with those who pledged.
“We’ve made about 12,000 calls so far, so touched base with about half of those.
“So I think, in some cases, we haven’t had a chance to speak to the person who made the offer yet, so we haven’t been able to see if that over is still live or if it’s been withdrawn.
“In certain circumstances, maybe, accomodation wasn’t quite as described, so in some cases accommodation that was described as a vacant unit was still shared, so we’ve had to readjust our expectations of how many people could be accommodated there.
“In some circumstances, people have said that seeing that this crisis isn’t a four or five week crisis, but that this is something that will go into the medium term, they just felt that the offer that they made wasn’t one they could sustain in the medium term.”
O’Gorman said that if a significant number of those that made pledges discussed the possibility of financial supports during their time housing refugees, that he would bring it to Government as part of a proposal.
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