Green Party Minister of State at the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Joe O’Brien has confirmed that in the first 23 weeks of 2024, more than 9,000 people arrived in Ireland seeking accommodation from the State, an average of 394 people per week.
Minister O’Brien said this is more than five times the average for the period 2017 to 2019.
He also confirmed that Government is working to ensure “an integrated approach to communications and community engagement” on issues surrounding IPAS accommodation centres.
He was responding to a question from Wicklow TD John Brady. Deputy Brady also claimed that “public representatives have been lied to regarding the provision of IPAS accommodation and have been given half-truths, mistruths and total untruths.”
He said “communities feel abandoned by the lack of communication. It is one thing coming in retrospectively to tell them what is happening in their community, but that engagement needs to start from day one and that is seriously lacking.”
Responding to the claims, Minister O’Brien said he wanted to” push back on the Deputy’s assertion that people are being lied to or are being told mistruths and untruths. It is very problematic and, frankly, it feeds the people who are spreading lies. What the Deputy said is simply not true.”
The minister also claimed that his Department is “telling people early and the reason people are not getting everything they want is because it is at an early stage. We can only tell people a certain amount when the process has started.”
In his reply to the minister’s remarks Deputy Brady claimed “the lack of a comprehensive communication plan is fanning the flames of hate and resentment being led by right-wing people exploiting the vacuum that the Minister of State and the Government have created because it is not putting out the accurate information.”
He referred to a recent analysis carried out by Sky News that found a total of 56% of the online content around an IPAS accommodation centre protest originated in the US, 20% in Ireland and 10% in Britain.
“There was no strategy there from the Department and the Government to counter that. Public representatives such as me are being lied to and have been lied to by the Department regarding the provision of accommodation where bulldozers were on the site in my constituency stripping back topsoil and putting down hardcore and members of the community and I were being told no decision had been taken on that specific site.”
Minister O’Brien challenged the use of the word ‘lie’ and said it was more accurate to say that IPAS accommodation proposals within communities are ‘fluid.’