A great scoop yesterday from Hugh O’Connell, over at the Independent:
Leo Varadkar has said he and his partner have registered to take in Ukrainian refugees as he expressed concerns that space in hotels and B&Bs could run out within days.
Mr Varadkar said that the State’s accommodating of refugees in the coming days and weeks will “present the biggest challenge”, saying he anticipated 20,000 refugees will have arrived in Ireland by the end of this month and that more than that will arrive…
…The Fine Gael leader said his partner Matt Barrett had registered them with the Irish Red Cross to provide accommodation to refugees. “Matt, who owns the house – I don’t own it – registered us with the Red Cross about three weeks ago. So we wouldn’t have been able to do that in the past, but have a house now and have a spare room.
20,000 Irish people have now offered some form of accommodation to Ukrainian refugees, whether that be from making “own door” accommodation available (IE – offering the refugees the use of a house that is currently empty) or offering the refugees a spare room in an already occupied house, as the Tánaiste and Mr. Barrett have done. So far, so feel-good.
The main problems, though, are time, and administration. Like everybody else who is offering a spare room, Mr. Varadkar and his partner will have to be vetted by Gardai to ensure the safety of the (predominantly) women and children who will be arriving here, seeking accommodation. That vetting process alone is an enormous administrative task. Another enormous administrative task is to match what people can offer up to what a refugee needs: Somebody who can offer a room with two beds and an en-suite bathroom is better suited to a mother and her child than somebody who can offer a single bed in a box room, for example. Those homes which have been offered in their entirety, by contrast, might be able to accommodate two full families.
Even so, this all just has the air of unreality about it. No doubt, the intentions of all involved are very good and very noble, but vital questions remain unanswered: At a very basic level, how long is a person who makes an offer like the one made by Mr. Varadkar expected to stick to it? Is the expectation that a person will be accommodated for six weeks? Six months? Or, potentially, six years? Yours truly has searched for that information, and, to date, it seems impossible to find.
There are, no doubt, people who have offered accommodation in good faith in the full expectation that they are offering something for several months and will have their holiday home back in time for their August trip to the seaside.
The other problem simply not being considered is the cultural challenges of accepting a Ukrainian family into an Irish home: The language barrier will provide a real challenge, in many cases. There is a reason, also, why people like having their own homes: Privacy, the right to lounge around in raggy clothes, the requirement to be as neat as you’d like to be, and no more. Living with total strangers will – with the very best will in the world – create tensions. It is an absolute certainty – and no reflection on anybody’s generosity – that within a few weeks, a significant number of people who contacted the red cross saying they could take refugees will be contacting the red cross again to say they can no longer accommodate those refugees. What then?
We are, at the moment, rightly motivated by compassion at events to the east, and a desire to help. There is no doubt whatsoever that, caught up in the moment, at least some Irish householders are presently writing cheques that their patience will not be able to cash, later on.
The fundamental problem here is that the Government has committed to doing something – accommodating up to 100,000 people – that the state just lacks the capacity to do. Here’s Varadkar again:
“The truth is it’s going to be very hard to accommodate tens of thousands of people. We’re up to 10,000 people as of now or certainly within the next day or two. We expect it will be 20,000 by the end of the month. It’s just simply a fact that we don’t have our own door accommodation for 20,000 people,” he said.
He is right. But we have committed, in public, remember, to accepting 100,000 people. Not 20,000. Now, we will most likely get lucky, and nowhere near 100,000 people will come. But if they do, we’re going to end up with massive refugee camps. Because even with Varadkar’s admirable personal generosity, there simply is nowhere to put these people.