Hundreds of beds to be offered to rough-sleeping asylum seekers, minister says

Hundreds of beds will be made available to asylum seekers who have no accommodation and are sleeping rough, the minister for integration has pledged.

Roderic O’Gorman said around 480 international protection applicants were without accommodation.

Many of those migrants are sleeping in tents in makeshift camps on city streets.

Two of the camps in Dublin city centre were targeted by anti-immigration protesters in recent days, with tents dismantled and set alight at one of the locations.

Mr O’Gorman acknowledged the accommodation system was “under real pressure right now”.

“And as long as people are being left unaccommodated, it’s not working as it should,” he told RTE Radio One.

The minister said the Government was responding to an “unprecedented situation” and was currently accommodating 84,000 people – comprising Ukrainian refugees and international asylum applicants – compared with 8,500 people at the start of last year.

“So irrespective of how robust the system you have, when you have that kind of increase you’re going to put a strain on it,” he said.

“And we see that same strain on systems across Europe. But we have to do better in terms of meeting our obligations to international protection applicants. So that’s why we’ve been looking at all options in terms of bringing additional beds into the system.

“We’re accommodating people in hotels and former barracks, in refurbished offices. And it’s through this work that over the next week we’ll be in the position to make a significant amount of offers of accommodation to people who up to this point have been unaccommodated and that will provide them with accommodation, with relevant services and with safety.”

He added: “As of the start of this weekend, there was just around 480 people who we hadn’t been able to make an offer of accommodation to and we will be able to make over the course of this week offers to a significant number of that group.

“We already had some come online on Friday. And, again, this is going to enable us to ensure that this group of people are safe, that they’re accommodated and we will continue to work for those we’re not in a position to accommodate to provide services to them.”

Mr O’Gorman said he and justice minister Simon Harris would be meeting Garda management this week to discuss the response to the anti-immigration demonstrators at the sites of some of the makeshift camps.

“Obviously people have the right to disagree with government policy, people have the right to protest,” he said.

“But they don’t have a right to intimidate people, they don’t have a right to commit acts of violence.”