Cashing In on Crisis: How Private Contractors Are Failing Ireland’s Most Vulnerable—While Making Millions

In January 2023, a risk assessment of the Citywest transit hub in Dublin—Ireland’s largest asylum accommodation centre—found that 80% of security staff were unlicensed and unvetted. Some were being paid cash in brown envelopes every Friday. Others were described as “clearly unsuitable” to work with vulnerable people. The report was sent to the Department of Integration. The contractors kept their lucrative government deal.

Fourteen months later, a video emerged showing an asylum seeker being held down by security staff while another guard punched him repeatedly in the head—sixteen times in total. A staff member speaking anonymously described the atmosphere as “oppressive,” marked by “abuse of power” and “frequent overuse of force.”

This is not an isolated failure. It is the inevitable consequence of a system designed for profit, not people.

Ireland’s International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) now houses over 33,000 people—asylum seekers fleeing war, persecution, and violence—across more than 320 centres nationwide. Over 90% of this accommodation is provided by private contractors. The State spent over €1 billion on IPAS in 2024. The budget for 2025 is €1.2 billion.

Yet a damning report from the Comptroller and Auditor General, published in September 2025, revealed that private operators overcharged the State by millions, that signed contracts went missing, that providers billed for beds that didn’t exist, and that one company alone overcharged €7.4 million in VAT—and still retained its government contract.

Behind these numbers are human beings. People who came to Ireland seeking safety. What they found instead was a system that treats their trauma as a business opportunity, their safety as an afterthought, and their dignity as optional.

The Body Count

In 2024, there were 55 “critical incidents” recorded across IPAS accommodation centres. Just under half involved mental health crises or self-harm. Twenty-three involved violence—either towards staff or between residents. Seven people died.

By late 2025, the situation had worsened. Sixty-one critical incidents were recorded in the first eleven months of 2025 alone—already exceeding the entire previous year’s total. Two more residents died.

Fiona Hurley, CEO of migrant rights organisation Nasc, responded to these figures with alarm: “These figures lay bare the long-standing, persistent gaps in mental health provision in Ireland, especially for vulnerable communities like asylum seekers who often face trauma, isolation, and prolonged uncertainty. For far too long, people who come here seeking safety have been left without the support they desperately need.”

Asylum seekers are five times more likely to experience mental health issues than the general population. Many arrive having survived war, torture, sexual violence, or the deaths of family members. They need specialist, culturally sensitive support.

What they get instead is a bed in an overcrowded dormitory—if they’re lucky—managed by private contractors whose staff have little training in trauma, mental health, or basic human rights.

Untrained, Unvetted, Unsuitable

When HIQA (the Health Information and Quality Authority) began inspecting IPAS centres in January 2024, the findings were stark.

Across the 51 centres inspected during 2024, HIQA found that 35% of staff had not been appropriately vetted by An Garda Síochána. More than half—56%—of centres had ineffective governance arrangements, with poor or non-existent reporting systems. Three-quarters of providers had limited or no systems to identify or monitor risk. Over a third of centres had no policies or procedures in place to protect residents from harm.

In one centre, inspectors found “an absence of a policy for adult safeguarding” and “a lack of awareness among the service provider, centre managers, and staff regarding their responsibility to safeguard vulnerable adults.” Staff had not completed mandatory Children First training. There was no designated officer to manage safeguarding concerns. When incidents occurred—drug use, alcohol abuse, aggressive behaviour—they went unrecorded.

The report noted: “There was no specialised training or support provided to staff in the centre to identify and respond to special reception needs and vulnerabilities of residents.”

John Lannon, CEO of migrant rights charity Doras, summarised what his organisation hears from residents: “issues of overcrowding, poor food quality and poor attitudes from staff and lack of training of staff.”

Children in Danger

Over 9,500 children currently live in IPAS accommodation. Many are in “emergency” centres—converted offices, former schools, sports halls, and even tents—that fall entirely outside HIQA’s inspection remit.

The Irish Refugee Council has reported being “alerted to numerous grievous risks to vulnerable residents accommodated in these centres, including to women and minor children. These reports included significant child protection issues and serious privacy concerns.”

HIQA inspections have uncovered disturbing conditions. At one Dublin centre housing 231 people, inspectors found 11 families where children aged ten and above were sharing bedrooms with parents or siblings of a different gender. HIQA warned this created “a potential to lead to accumulative harm to the children.” The provider had failed to identify this as a welfare risk.

At another centre, inspectors discovered “a safeguarding incident involving the welfare of four children was not managed in line with national policy or guidance.”

Health professionals have long warned that direct provision environments—with “inadequately trained professionals and staff, physical abuse, lack of supervision of children, and close contact of many families with young children to unfamiliar adults”—are fundamentally unsafe for child development.

Yet private contractors continue to operate centres with minimal oversight, inadequate safeguarding policies, and unvetted staff walking the corridors where children sleep.

Violence Behind Closed Doors

The Citywest transit hub has become a flashpoint for concerns about security staff conduct. But complaints stretch back years.

The Irish Refugee Council wrote to the Department of Integration in December 2022 “raising several concerns about security staff behaviour and that there seemed to be a lack of training for staff in working with vulnerable people.” They received further complaints in summer 2023. Then came the video in March 2024.

The Council has documented “several extremely concerning reports of alleged violence perpetrated by security officers working at Citywest against residents. Several residents sustained serious and life-altering injuries arising out of the alleged violence.”

Perhaps most disturbingly, “Others had their reception conditions withdrawn and were rendered street homeless in purported acts of retribution perpetrated against residents for their involvement in such incidents.”

People who complained about being assaulted found themselves expelled onto the streets of Dublin with nothing.

At Knockalisheen centre in Clare, where residents include people living in military-style tents, HIQA found “multiple incidents of physical, verbal abuse and aggression at the centre which had not been appropriately managed, risk assessed or reported in line with national policy.” Despite increased security presence, this “had not enhanced the feeling of safety amongst the group.”

The residents still felt unsafe. Because they were.

The Training Deficit

The pattern is consistent: private providers take government contracts worth millions but fail to invest in proper staff training. Cultural sensitivity? Conflict resolution? Trauma-informed care? Basic human rights awareness? These are treated as luxuries, not necessities.

Research on frontline staff working with asylum seekers in Ireland has consistently identified the same gaps. One study found that workers “had difficulties working with, and understanding, cultural differences. They also had difficulties with language differences and communication. They desired intercultural training to advance their knowledge and skills.”

A GP interviewed for the study explained that he “lacked skills to communicate with patients with limited English proficiency, work with interpreters, recognise cultural diversity such as differences between one’s own and patients’ health beliefs.”

If medical professionals felt underprepared, what hope is there for security guards hired without vetting, paid in cash, and given no training on working with traumatised populations?

The World Psychiatric Association has recommended that all staff working with refugees receive training in cultural competency. It suggested each clinical service should have a lead clinician responsible for cultural competency training. Ireland has no such system in place for IPAS centres.

Instead, private contractors are left to self-regulate. The results speak for themselves.

The Accountability Black Hole

Perhaps the most damning structural failure is this: the vast majority of asylum seekers in Ireland—over 25,000 people, including 7,500 children—live in “emergency” accommodation that falls entirely outside independent inspection.

HIQA’s mandate extends only to “permanent” IPAS centres. Emergency centres—converted offices, sports halls, tents—are exempt. Yet this is precisely where the most vulnerable residents are placed, often in the worst conditions.

John Lannon of Doras has warned: “When it comes to the emergency or temporary accommodation centres, there are certainly worrying levels of poor governance. In places, poor service delivery. There’s insufficient oversight of standards.”

He has called for HIQA’s remit to be expanded to cover all IPAS accommodation. The government has not acted.

Meanwhile, contracts worth millions are awarded to companies that can operate with minimal scrutiny. In 2025 alone, twelve IPAS centres were closed for “non-compliance with regulations or contractual breaches”—more than three times the number closed in all of 2024. Yet beyond vague references to planning permission, fire safety, or health and safety issues, the government provides no detail on what went wrong, or why these operators were given contracts in the first place.

Sinn Féin’s Matt Carthy has argued this “is very significant and suggests that there wasn’t sufficient checks before contracts were granted to those seeking to profit from the Government’s failures in relation to international protection.”

The Profit Motive

At the heart of this system is a fundamental conflict of interest. Private contractors are paid to provide beds, not outcomes. Their incentive is to minimise costs—on staffing, training, facilities—while maximising occupancy and billing.

The Comptroller and Auditor General found evidence of this dynamic at work. One provider billed for more residents than their contract allowed—€11,600 in a single month. Another charged €15,000 monthly for three rooms that weren’t in use. For over a third of payments examined, signed contracts were missing entirely, meaning invoiced rates couldn’t be verified.

Some operators have become extraordinarily wealthy. One family network of companies, linked to former GAA manager Séamus “Banty” McEnaney, has received over €200 million for providing emergency accommodation since 2018. In the first three months of 2025 alone, McEnaney family companies were paid €24.4 million.

Many of the beneficiary companies are registered as “unlimited,” meaning they are not legally required to publish their profits. Public money flows in; public accountability flows out.

As one TD put it in the Dáil: “People have become millionaires overnight providing what is sometimes unsuitable accommodation in what I would call a deeply flawed system, while many communities have lost vital local amenities, including hotels.”

A System Built for Failure

The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission has called delays in the asylum system “systemic and pernicious.” Academic researchers have documented how the “wholescale institutionalisation of asylum seekers in the direct provision system violates human rights.” The purpose of the system, one researcher concluded after extensive analysis, “has been to deter people from coming to Ireland to claim asylum.”

If deterrence was the goal, cruelty becomes a feature, not a bug.

The government has promised reform. Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan has spoken of developing “a more stable and sustainable accommodation system in the long term” with 14,000 State-owned beds to “reduce reliance on the private market.” A new rate-card pricing structure has reportedly saved €52 million on 104 contracts.

But these reforms address cost, not care. They do nothing to mandate cultural competency training, trauma-informed approaches, or human rights awareness. They don’t expand independent inspection to emergency accommodation. They don’t address the fundamental problem: that Ireland has outsourced its moral and legal obligations to vulnerable people to private companies whose primary obligation is to their shareholders.

What Needs to Change

The evidence is overwhelming. Ireland’s privatised asylum accommodation system is failing the people it is meant to protect. The reforms needed are clear:

First, HIQA’s inspection mandate must be extended to cover all IPAS accommodation—including emergency centres and tented facilities. Independent oversight should not be a privilege reserved for the lucky minority in “permanent” centres.

Second, mandatory training standards must be introduced for all staff working in IPAS accommodation. This must include cultural competency, trauma-informed care, conflict resolution, and human rights awareness. Providers who fail to meet these standards should lose their contracts.

Third, Garda vetting must be completed before any staff member begins work—not afterwards, not eventually, not when convenient.

Fourth, the government should accelerate its transition to State-owned accommodation. When profit is removed from the equation, the incentive shifts from cost-cutting to care.

Fifth, there must be a full, independent review of all IPAS contracts—past and present—to identify profiteering, non-compliance, and abuse. Those who have enriched themselves while failing vulnerable people must be held accountable.

Finally, vulnerability assessments—which Ireland is legally obligated to provide—must be reinstated immediately. You cannot protect people from harm if you don’t know what makes them vulnerable.

The people in Ireland’s IPAS system came here seeking protection. They fled violence, persecution, and fear. What they found was a system that treats their suffering as an inconvenience and their safety as a cost to be minimised.

They deserve better. Ireland can do better. The question is whether it has the political will to try.