Taoiseach concedes refugees may be housed in tents during winter months

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has conceded that the use of tents to accommodate Ukrainian refugees and international protection applicants may continue into the winter months if the numbers coming to Ireland continue to rise.

Mr Varadkar said that the plan was to use tented accommodation at the site of Electric Picnic in Stradbally in Co Laois for the next six weeks to accommodate Ukrainian refugees but when pressed he admitted that the Government may be forced to use tents for longer periods.

“That’s what I’m informed, that it’s going to be temporary and that it won’t last more than a few weeks and we’ll be able to find accommodation for people after that. But there will be times when we need to use tents. It’s not ideal,” said Mr Varadkar during a visit to Cork.

“Nobody wants to have to do this [use tents in winter] but the truth is, we have a huge number of people arriving in the country from Ukraine and from other parts of the world and we have responsibilities, ability to provide them with shelter and tents are not the solution that we want but on occasions they have been used and may have to be used again.”

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Mr Varadkar said that some Ukrainians had been accommodated in modular housing in Cork recently and the Rapid Building Housing Programme clearly offered a possible solution to the housing challenge, but no one should underestimate the challenge in delivering such homes.

“I think it is good that some of these homes (Rapid Building Housing) are now in place and there are people living in them, including here in Cork. And we’re going to see hundreds more developed over the next couple of months.

“And I do think that it could help form part of the wider solution when it comes to housing supply. But I do know when it does come to modular homes or modular buildings, they’re never as quick to build as people think. And they’re not particularly cheap but they are definitely part of the solution.”

Asked why there was such a delay in delivering modular homes when less than 10pc of the intended 750 modular homes have been built and occupied and why given such delays the plan was still called a Rapid Building Housing Project, Mr Varadkar said there were different reasons in different places.

“You know, you can’t just drop a home into a field. One of the things you have to do, for example, is make sure that the sites are serviced and in a lot of cases it’s been it’s been getting electricity and getting the road in getting the services in, and in some places when they’ve gone to the sites, they found problems that they didn’t know that were there for example, like having to move a pipe.

“It’s never as simple as just ordering a house from a factory and putting it on a truck and dropping it into a field. It does take time and, you know, I tend not to use the term rapid build for that reason, I think modular, new methods of construction or modern methods of construction is a better description.”