We must cap our intake of Ukrainian refugees and ensure they are properly taken care of

WHEN Russia first invaded Ukraine, everyone expected the conflict to end within a matter of weeks. Surely, in this day and age, no civilised country seriously intended to resolve a territorial conflict with tanks and guns and boots on the ground? All wars ultimately end with negotiation, communication, compromise and there have never been more avenues to facilitate resolution, nor more warnings from history as to the nightmarish alternatives.

It was in that context that thousands of families across this country pledged to welcome Ukrainian refugees into their homes, firmly convinced that their hospitality would be called upon for no more than a matter of weeks, or months at most.

It was also in that context that we didn’t even consider putting a cap on the number of desperate, fleeing people we would take in – the very suggestion, back in late February, would have seemed inhumane and small-minded.

Three months on, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis as bad as the 1980s, with food and fuel prices skyrocketing, the effects of the pandemic still being felt and with 31,000 Ukrainian refugees now amongst us, the idea of capping their number no longer looks like such an outrageous proposition. It’s beginning to look a lot like common sense.

Even before Covid, before inflation went through the roof, we had a severe housing crisis in this country. Before we knew what was ahead of us, back in the early months of 2020, we’d all have agreed that housing was our single biggest political and social concern.

Asked now, most people would say that their biggest worry is putting food on the table, or heating their homes or running their cars, but that doesn’t mean we’ve solved housing. It just means that bigger, scarier worries have nudged it from centre stage.

The rising cost of living, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, makes it all the harder for people to afford to pay rent – if they could even find somewhere to live – and next to impossible for young people to save for a home, if they could find somewhere even remotely affordable.

If even a few people with second homes, who might have been tempted to brave the rental market, opt to offer them to Ukrainian refugees instead, it would impact the already paltry rental pool.

An ordinary taxpayer, perhaps thinking of renting out a deceased parent’s home, will be looking at paying up to 52% of their rental income in tax, while the private equity funds who own the massive apartment blocks pay no tax at all on rental income.

And once they’ve negotiated the maze of regulations, inspections, rent pressure zone restrictions and assorted other onerous requirements imposed on private landlords, they might just feel that a guaranteed €400 a month for housing a Ukrainian refugee is a better deal all round.

Our hearts were in the right place when we first flung our doors open to unlimited numbers of Ukrainians, but it would have made more sense to have had a viable policy for accommodating them in the right place, too. More than half of the 24,000 people who originally pledged to take in refugees quickly realised that their offers, though genuinely meant, were unworkable.

Meanwhile, of the 9,000 offers that have been approved to date, just 900 have actually been taken up. So the rest of the refugees are still in State accommodation, and that’s having a devastating knockon effect on the hospitality industry. Restaurants, shops, services that relied on tourists during the busy summer months now see their local hotels full of refugees, meaning the revenue they’d hoped would help them recover from Covid just isn’t there.

We’re heading towards increasing our population by 1%, all of whom will need to be housed in a country with a deepening housing crisis.

And Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien has said we could end up taking in 100,000 Ukrainians as the war goes on. Given they’re already being put up in cramped hubs and hotel rooms, in a country with a finite amount of space to spare, how is that fair on anybody?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to cap the number of refugees at, say, 35,000, and set about providing proper housing for those we have taken in?

This war could last years, and with mass migration from Africa forecast as food shortages set desperate people on the move, we’ll have to limit our intake sooner or later. While there’s still a chance to provide decent, dignified, long-term accommodation for those who have found refuge here so far, it should be sooner rather than later.