State to buy six new housing hubs as Government scrambles with immigration

The Government is to acquire up to six new accommodation centres — with beds for up to 3,600 people — and audit existing buildings being used for refugees and asylum seekers, as part of efforts to deal with the immigration crisis.

It comes after it emerged that there may be significant “spare capacity” lying idle, the Sunday Independent can reveal.

The country’s more than 200 current accommodation centres, housing 26,000 people nationwide, have been contracted on a capacity basis rather than for individual occupancy.

Yesterday Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said there was an “issue” around whether existing centres were being fully used.

The disclosure gives rise to the prospect that there may be hundreds, possibly thousands of spare beds in the system which were being unused, at a time when the State is contracting new accommodation centres around the country.

Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman is also finalising plans for the Government to acquire up to six accommodation centres across the country, each on a scale similar to that which is operating out of the Citywest Hotel in Dublin.

Each centre would have the capacity to take between 450 and 600 people.

Work on the procurement process for these centres will begin once a memo is agreed by Cabinet either later this month or in early February, with some centres operationalised later this year, possibly as soon as summer.

Potential sites are being discussed — but there is a sensitivity around identifying exact locations following a spate of arson attacks on smaller buildings that had been proposed to accommodate international protection applicants in recent months, including three buildings so far this year.

Writing in the Sunday Independent today, Independent TD for Clare Michael McNamara says the Department of Integration “seems to have little oversight of the numbers of people actually staying in the centres for which it is paying”.

Mr McNamara says that, when requested, the Integration Department was “unable to provide numbers staying in individual centres on a given night”.

He claims: “Providers are making a fortune from being paid to accommodate and feed people that have long since left their centre, perhaps even the State.

“The minister and his department close down the only functioning hotel in an area, or a currently-used student accommodation centre, to replace it with another ‘cash cow’, with apparently little overview of the occupancy levels in facilities already being paid for.”

Mr Varadkar told the Sunday Independent: “We are aware of this issue. There’ll always be a certain level of vacancy with people coming and going — but some providers have been on to TDs and ministers to say they have capacity that is being unused.

“So we are examining it, to make sure any spare capacity is filled quickly — thus reducing the need to open new centres.”

Yesterday., a spokesman for Mr O’Gorman said: “We monitor ‘centre registers’ that are submitted by providers on a weekly basis and reconcile movements, move-ons and transfers within that.

“Department staff check these registers and liaise with providers to maximise capacity and configuration. Added to this, centre visits and inspections ensure further compliance measures exist to ensure space is best utilised.”

He was unable to say how many such inspections have taken place, and whether those inspections that have taken place related specifically to occupancy levels.

“Every centre is inspected prior to use and periodically thereafter.

“I’d also note that there is sometimes ghost capacity in the system. A six-bed family offering may have a five-person family in it — but that would not mean a spare bed.”

Meanwhile, Justice Minister Helen McEntee is set to revise the list of “safe countries of origin” from which arrivals to Ireland find it much harder to obtain refugee status — and to have migrants’ applications processed within three months.

The addition and removal of some countries is likely to “mean fewer people can claim asylum”, a source said.

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