About €400,000 was spent on a mothballed tented accommodation centre for asylum seekers in Co Wicklow that was the site of major disturbances last year.
The site – River Lodge at Newtownmountkennedy, the site of anti-immigration protests in April 2024 – was used as emergency accommodation for international protection applicants.
In a letter to the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee, the Department of Justice said it spent “circa €400,000” on the site but that in December last year, residents had to be moved to alternative accommodation due to severe weather conditions.
Due to the impact of the weather, the department said, it was not possible to continue using River Lodge as an emergency tented accommodation centre. A process to explore options to repurpose it was carried out.
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Following technical and financial assessments – with a particular focus on waste water treatment infrastructure – “it was deemed not possible to move forward with such proposals”.
“The department is maintaining security on the site and there are no current plans to accommodate international protection applicants at this location,” the PAC was told.
The committee heard the department’s compliance team had recovered more than €975,000 following reviews of centres accommodating migrants. Meanwhile, during contract renewals, it was established that one contractor had not provided the full cohort of contracted beds, with the State clawing back €345,000 arising from that.
The letter from the department’s secretary general, Oonagh McPhilips, also outlines that the International Protection Office is ultimately responsible for determining the age of an applicant being treated as an unaccompanied minor in the system.
Tusla, meanwhile, is responsible for determining if someone is entitled to access their services, including the provision of accommodation.
However, the committee was told that an assessment undertaken by Tusla to determine this access had in practice been taken as determining their age both for use of the agency’s services and for processing their application for international protection.
Fine Gael TD for Dublin Bay South James Geoghegan, who is a PAC member, said that this “directly contradicts” evidence given by the department. He said that at a recent hearing, department officials “allowed the committee to believe that Tusla is responsible for age assessments”.
He said this raises “real concerns about transparency and the accuracy of what the PAC was told”, saying that the body legally responsible for establishing the age of an applicant “has effectively outsourced or defaulted to Tusla without telling the Oireachtas or explaining why”.
The letter from Ms McPhilips says that when new laws that will overhaul the international protection system come into effect next year, the IPO will arrange and be responsible for managing age assessments.
“The new legislation will set out in far greater detail how age is to be assessed”, with new regulations governing standards and the qualifications of personnel involved in that process.
Mr Geoghegan said this move “suggests the department already knows the current system is seriously inadequate but avoided saying so when asked directly about concerns”.
He said that there has been an increase of 13.5 per cent in arrivals of unaccompanied minors during this year, when overall international protection numbers have reduced.
