Junior minister: Communicating with locals difficult when migrants on streets

The junior minister for integration has said that communicating with locals ahead of time is difficult when hundreds of asylum seekers are sleeping on the streets.

Joe O’Brien, the Minister of State with responsibility for integration at the Department of Children, said that a national strategy is to be rolled out that he hopes will help improve communicating “a coherent message”.

The Green Party TD made the comments on Wednesday evening as he and his party colleague Minister Roderic O’Gorman defended the Irish Government’s attempts to house and integrate migrants into communities around Ireland.

It comes as almost 500 asylum seekers are thought to be on the streets as Ireland struggles to find State-provided accommodation for them.

Locals near Magowna House in Co Clare, where more than 30 asylum seekers were brought to on Monday evening, have raised concerns that they were not informed about the move before it happened.

“On the communications side of things, as I said earlier today, what happens is that as soon as a contract is signed, we get the information together and we contact the local representatives, and we have to open as quickly as we can,” he said.

“So that timelag between when a contract is signed and when it’s opened is quite short, it can be a couple of days, it can be a week, if we’re doing well, it can be two weeks.

“So therein lies the problem, and that problem just relates to the fact that people are on the streets and when we get a contract signed, we have to move fast.

“In terms of the communications strategy, the Department of Taoiseach started in February or March in terms of drafting a whole of Government approach to this.

“They’ll be leading out on this in terms of the tender that was put out.

“We should be getting answers on that tender in the coming weeks as well, and the idea is to have a consistent message across national and local government and among communities as well about what’s happening in their area.

“I think that will help in terms of communicating a coherent message.

“We will still face the problem we have now though, unless we get more accommodation, of having to move very fast when we do get accommodation.”

On Tuesday evening, Clare County Council indicated that at that point, it had “not received formal notification or details of the arrivals” at Magowna House Hotel.