Back over spend
■ INTEGRATION OFFICIALS PUSHED BACK AGAINST BID TO END PRACTICE
was “a potential breach of contract”.
The resistance appears to have been overruled by Minister Roderic O’Gorman, however, who wanted “a new policy on pets in our accommodation”, according to an email from a top civil servant.
Clear
“Minister is clear – from date XX we will no longer accommodate people arriving into Ireland with their pets in our accommodation,” they wrote on September 16.
“If they still come with pets, we will give them the choice of divesting themselves of the pets… or they find their own accommodation.”
A Department spokeswoman told
The Star this week that the Government had communicated that it would no longer be providing accommodation for newly arrived or newly acquired pets in State-funded accommodation from November 9, 2022.
But the Tanaiste defended the expenditure, insisting that there was “a context at the time”.
He said: “There’s an exhibition in the train station in Kiev, which recalls the horror facing the population of Ukraine at the time. Photographs of mothers with their children, looking out the windows at their husbands, in-laws, grandparents, frightened children. That was the scene.
“OK, we all responded in a humanitarian way at the time. No one believed the war would go on for two years. The essential response that we made at the time was to be a humane response.
“OK, you may now, two-and-a-half years on, instance one aspect of that response and sort of create a lot of angst about it and so on.”
“I think, there was a context at the time in which this country responded. We can be overly negative about ourselves all of the time, I think it was a decent response. I think it was a decent response that reflected the best of what we are as a people,” he added.
The €1m a month spend was in addition to the €808,132 on transport, kennelling and veterinary services by the Department of Agriculture.