Fears grow in Government about Irish capacity to house Ukrainian refugees

There are acute concerns in Government about capacity to house Ukrainian refugees, with the available supply of hotel and B&B places almost exhausted.

While senior officials said facilities such as large halls with camp beds and tents were unlikely to be required before Easter, sources were unwilling to rule them out beyond that.

A scramble for additional sources of accommodation is under way across all arms of government and local authorities, with an emergency summit of the construction and property industry due to be held on Monday by Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien.

EU foreign ministers are to discuss further sanctions against Russia on Monday and will also hold talks with the prosecutor from the International Criminal Court on its investigation into potential war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine.

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At the same time the first face-to-face meeting between a European Union leader and Russian president Vladimir Putin since the start of the invasion of Ukraine is to take place when Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer travels to Moscow.

The moves come as the White House argued that brutality against civilians in Ukraine was not just down to random acts by individual soldiers but formed part of the overall plan by Moscow for the invasion of the country.

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday “this is an orchestrated plot from the Kremlin”.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general said the bodies of more than 1,200 people had been found in the Kyiv region. Iryna Venediktova also said Ukraine had started to pursue about 5,600 cases of war crimes linked to Russia’s invasion, and suspects in just the main “anchor case” included more than 500 top military, political and other officials in Russia.

‘Putin’s strategy’

Taoiseach Micheál Martin said huge refugee flows were “part of Putin’s strategy, deliberately targeting civilians ... to create this type of hybrid warfare, in other words, creating this very large migratory phenomenon so that it creates pressure on democracies”.

On Sunday Minister for Equality and Integration Roderic O’Gorman said the State had “probably reached the limit in terms of the amount of hotel or B&B accommodation that we can provide, so it’s now looking at other sources, looking at those institutional buildings, filling out the pledges and looking at supports local authorities can provide”.

“The system is under pressure,” Mr O Gorman added.

The Taoiseach said: “It’s going to become extremely challenging.”

Both Mr Martin and Mr O’Gorman said the Government would consider paying householders who accepted Ukrainian refugees into their homes.

The Taoiseach told reporters that the question of paying people to take Ukrainian refugees into their homes would be “examined in due course”.

Mr O’Gorman said there had been no formal discussion but the issue could be considered.

Some 21,000 refugees have now arrived into the country from Ukraine following the Russian invasion. Of those, about 13,000 are being put up in State-provided accommodation.

Former convents

Mr O’Gorman said the “vast majority” of those 13,000 people were being accommodated in hotels and guesthouses around the country.

“We have secured over 3,000 rooms now at this stage and that’s the primary means by which we are accommodating people. We’ve also secured the use of maybe larger institutions, former convents and the like, and we’ll be looking to secure more of those going forward,” he told Newstalk.

Mr O’Gorman said they had not needed to use military-style accommodation at Green Glens Arena at Millstreet, Co Cork, or Gormanston Camp in Co Meath “yet”.

“Of course, a number will be accommodated in pledged accommodation as well, and that number is going to grow in the coming weeks.”

But some Ministers and senior officials are privately critical of the pace of the process of turning pledges of rooms and empty houses for refugees into accommodation. One Minister said that the process seemed “astonishingly slow”.

The Taoiseach said on Sunday: “We have to move fast in terms of going through all the pledges.”