The Government was yesterday accused of abandoning asylum-seekers in rural areas as it emerged that two groups of asylum-seekers have been sent to west Cork without notification to either the Southern Health Board or Cork County Council.
The claims came at yesterday's SHB meeting as the SHB chief executive, Mr Sean Hurley, revealed that the board and Cork County Council learned of the arrival of a group of asylum-seekers in Cork only when their bus arrived.
"The whole policy is totally unco-ordinated," said Mr Hurley, who also rejected recent criticism of the board for its insistence that providing accommodation for asylum-seekers was a matter for local authorities.
"Our health board is not a housing authority - I don't know of any provision in the Health Act that provides for this", he said.
A Fianna Fail councillor, Mr Vivian O'Callaghan, said a group of 30 asylum-seekers had arrived in Ballylickey in west Cork last week - again without any notification to either Cork County Council or the SHB.
"The level of co-ordination is virtually nil - people arrived in Ballylickey last week and the first we knew about it was when they arrived and today asylum-seekers arrived in Clonakilty and nobody knew about it," he said.
Mr O'Callaghan said that while accommodation for the asylum-seekers was excellent, local communities did not always have the necessary facilities to support such groups.
Fine Gael TD Mr Bernard Allen said the Government's handling of the issue was a shambles. "The whole thing is uncoordinated, mismanaged and confused."
However, a Kerry councillor, Mr Paul O'Donoghue, defended the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue (his brother), saying that the Minister had not issued a diktat to local authorities to take asylum-seekers but had simply requested them to provide accommodation if they could.
