O’Gorman claims inaction of housing minister led to reliance on hotels for asylum seekers

Speaking to the Irish Examiner, Mr O’Gorman said he hopes his party will grow its number of seats and return to Government as no other political group will ensure climate targets are met.

But he suggested that the two larger parties may not want to do a deal with the Greens after the general election and instead will chose “the path of least resistance”.

Mr O’Gorman also says he “regrets” the way in which survivors of mother and baby homes were dealt with at the beginning of his time in office.

Venting frustration with a lack of action from the Housing Minister, Mr O’Gorman said: “We have about 32,000 people in the international protection system right now, about 6,000 of those are people with status, people who have been given a legal right to remain. They’ve gone through the process, and the process that said, ‘yes, you’re a refugee, you’re entitled to stay’.

“At that point, legal responsibility for them passes from our Department, and I think that’s an area where that joined up approach across government hasn’t worked as well as it should.

“If those 6,000 beds in our system had been free, that’s 12, 14, 15 large hotels that we wouldn’t have had to bring into the system over that period of time.

“I think we would have had less need to expand the amount of international protection accommodation we had, if the system for people with status was working better.”

Mr O’Gorman suggested that Mr O’Brien did not see the provision of accommodation for those exiting direct provision “as what the law says it is, which is the responsibility of the Department of Housing”.

Detailing the work that his own Department had carried out in finding accommodation for those arriving here from Ukraine and those seeking international protection, he said: “There hasn’t been the focus on that group of people by the Department of Housing that was needed.

“I recognise the Department of Housing has a huge job of work in terms of delivering Housing for All, but I found accommodation solutions for over 100,000 people over the last number of years.

It’s been difficult, it’s been challenging, but we’ve been able to do it, and we’ve provided that humanitarian response

Mr O’Gorman, who was elected to the Dáil for the first time in 2020 and took up a role in Cabinet shortly after, admitted that he made mistakes early on in not listening fully to survivors of mother and baby homes.

He also said he had relied too heavily on the advice of his civil servants in accepting controversial legislation to seal records for 30 years, a move which caused massive backlash at the time.

“It was a huge learning curve, and it happened maybe three months into being a minister, and really only eight months into being a TD. As I was a first-time TD, I’d never really had the chance to learn the ropes of being a backbencher.

“I regret my failure to initially engage with former residents, to understand the frustration that they were feeling at that point after what was then probably five and a half years of the Commission [of Investigation] ongoing.”

Asked if he had listened too carefully to his civil servants and not the survivors, he said: “No one had flagged to me at the time the sensitivity of the issue in terms of the Department’s engagement with survivors. I wasn’t aware of how poorly that relationship had, I suppose, deteriorated over the previous number of years and I was presented with what I was told was a small piece of legislation that would deal with with a technical issue.”

However, Mr O’Gorman said: “The information that we protected in that legislation is now has now being used by up to 11,000 former residents or adopted people, so they can get their birth and early life information. It is worth saying prior to the legislation I introduced, adopted people, thousands of them, had never been able to get their original birth cert, their original name.”

Alliances

When asked about the fact that the two main parties now appear to be strongly courting the Labour party, Mr O’Gorman said it is important that his party remain in government to ensure our carbon reduction targets are met.

“We do see some negativity, a lot of it kind of behind the scenes briefing. I think that’s because we were effective,” he said when asked about snipes and criticisms coming from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil members.

“We fought every day to get our policies implemented and we got them implemented. I think it’s natural that larger political parties look for the path of least resistance when it comes to a coalition they want, they want an easy life, and we didn’t give them an easy life.

“But we did give stability to this country over four and a half years through incredibly turbulent times, Covid, the cost of living crisis, the response to the war in Ukraine.

“My concern is, if you have the more right wing independents or smaller parties, you have a government that will jettison the approach to climate, but you’ll also have an unstable government. If you think back to the 2016 to 2020 coalition, that did nothing on climate, but it also was unstable.”

Mr O’Gorman says his party is “in this election to hold our seats and to grow our number of seats”, but admits that his own constituency is challenging.

“My read of it was a couple of days to go is that Jack [Chambers], Emer [Currie] and Paul Donnelly are all safe. The big three will get one seat each, and there’ll be a battle for the final two seats. I’m very much in that battle. People know me, they know the work that I’ve done. It’s 20 years since I first contested an election in Dublin West. I’m known all over the constituency.”