Sharon Keogan demands answers on Department house purchases

Mayor Locke and Minister, you're very welcome in this afternoon and I welcome the opportunity to raise this commencement matter because what has emerged in recent days is deeply troubling and goes to the heart of transparency, housing policy and public trust. The issue today is simple. How many properties has the Department of Justice acquired for international protection since 2020? Where are they? How many are in use? And how many are sitting vacant and under refurbishment? The way this matter came to light should concern everyone in this house. In Stamullin, in County Meath, a residential village, already under intense housing pressure, local residents discovered that a private house in a normal housing estate had been purchased by the Department of Justice for international protection accommodation in 2022. That discovery did not come through any formal notification, public engagement or planning process. It came about only because the residents themselves decided to investigate the property after noting how long it had been vacant and suddenly seeing furniture delivery vans and grew curious about who their new neighbours would be. I myself personally went into the local authority offices to confirm the facts, the housing officials unaware of the ownership until they checked the land registry. That alone tells us something is very wrong. It is deeply troubling on several levels. First, there was no consultation with the local community. There was no advanced engagement with residents. There was no transparent communications with the local authority. Decisions of this scale were taken quietly and implemented without any regard for the basic principle that communities deserve to know what is happening in their own estates. Second, this appears to have been done with no consideration of local housing pressure. In Stamullin and the surrounding areas, families are waiting years for homes. Housing lists are long. Young people cannot stay in their own communities and yet the state is purchasing residential houses in housing estates, sometimes leaving them vacant for years while local needs go unmet. That's not some kind of hypothetical concern. It is happening now. People are reasonable. Communities understand humanitarian obligations. But people must be consulted. Leaving communities in the dark and then surprising them with developments like this is precisely how trust is destroyed and backlash is created. Transparency is not optional. It is essential if public policy is to function at all. What is particularly alarming is that this does not appear to be an isolated case. The Department has now acknowledged that it manages dozens of in-community properties nationwide. Yet there appears to be no publicity accessible register, no clear planning framework and no mechanism for local authorities or elected representatives to understand where these properties are located and how decisions are made. This commensal matter is not about blindly opposing international protection. It's about accountability. It's about fairness. And it's about ensuring that decisions are made transparently, lawfully and with regard to local realities. As an aside, we also need to begin a serious discussion about what mechanisms can we create going forward to ensure transparency and fairness. And I hope the Minister's response can be a token of good faith to that end. So today I ask the Minister for Justice to set out, or Minister Brophy, to set out the facts clearly for this House and for the public. Without transparency, suspicious grows. Without consultation, trust collapses. And without proper governance, even well-intentioned policy becomes unsustainable. Thanks, Minister. Thank you, Ciarán. And thank you for the opportunity to talk about the work obviously that myself and Minister O'Callaghan are doing in managing international protection processing and accommodation. Ireland has at all times endeavoured to provide accommodation and other basic supports to people seeking international protection as is required, as you know, under EU and Irish law. The International Protection and Accommodation Service, which is normally known as IPAS, is currently accommodating over 33,000 residents in 305 international protection accommodation centres around the country. Currently over 80% of accommodation capacity is provided through commercial providers. As Senators will be aware, the state has to respond to a very significant increase in demand for accommodation since 2022, both to support high numbers of applicants for international protection and at the same time responding to the arrival of over 100,000 Ukrainians. In contracting accommodation over recent years, despite significant pressure on accommodation supply, the Department has worked to avoid competing significantly with the residential property sector. The great majority of IPAS emergency accommodation centres are located in group settings in larger properties, like former hotels and guest houses, commercial and institutional buildings. A small proportion for more vulnerable applicants who have special reception needs may be accommodated in smaller-scale properties. In line with the Programme for Government and the Comprehensive Accommodation Strategy for International Protection Applicants approved in 2024, the state is working to develop more state-owned international protection accommodation. The purchase, therefore, in 2025 of the City West Hotel and Invention Centre was a significant milestone in implementing this strategy. Over recent years, this has also included developing some in-community style accommodation for very specific groups of very vulnerable applicants, a very limited-scale group of residents for whom standard or group IPAS accommodation would therefore not be suitable. To date, 37 in-community properties have been purchased for the accommodation of international protection applicants. Thirty-four of these properties are being deployed to meet the needs of vulnerable cohorts of applicants. Three of these properties are currently under review for alternative use outside of international protection. Since 2024, IPAS has not published details of specific locations, resident profile and occupancy of our individual accommodation centres. This is to preserve privacy, safety and well-being of residents and staff, which I am sure the Senator would agree with. Minister, thank you very much for the reply. I have to say it is not really as detailed as I would have liked. In relation to the 37 in-community properties that the Department have purchased, nobody knows where they are. Are they currently occupied? Are they unoccupied? Like the one we have in Stimlin that has been left vacant for the last four years. The three properties that are currently under review for outside the IP accommodation, what is that? Is that for something to do with the Department of Justice? Is it for maybe prisoners that are leaving prison? It is a very vague answer that you have given me here today. Minister, do you think it is right that the first I hear of a house in my community is through the media? Do you think that is right? We are the people on the ground every day of the week. Do you think we should be reading that in a newspaper? This is something that you should be doing. If you want community engagement, you need to be telling your elected representatives what is happening. At this moment in time, you have not been doing that. This is why we have problems around the country. I am not really happy with your response, Minister. Thank you very much, Senator. I just want to begin by again referring to the closing remarks which I made in my initial reply to you. Since 2024, IPAS has not published the details of specific locations, the resident profile and the occupancy of individual accommodation centres. It is for a very good reason. It is obviously to preserve the privacy, safety and wellbeing of residents and staff. That is accepted good practice. I am sure that you can see that there is a need to protect and preserve those privacies and wellbeing for residents and staff. I think that is very important. The work of myself and Minister O'Callaghan has always been focused on wanting to provide what we believe is the best possible service, the best service in terms of providing international protection to applicants and also ensuring working with communities through our engagement groups in making sure that we have a dialogue and an ongoing process of dealing with communities, and also particularly, which we have been very successful in doing, in having an overall reduction in the number of international applicants coming into our country, seeing that number fall by over 30%, by therefore not being able to have to open new IPAS centres, by consolidating the IPAS centres which we currently have, by saving the state millions of quid in terms of actually doing that work and ensuring that we are providing now a very good, very, very focused international protection service which delivers, I believe, for the people of Ireland in terms of value for money and also delivers for the communities and delivers for providing the services to people seeking international protection. Thanks Minister. Thank you.