Minister for Community Development Joe O’Brien is on an informal visit to Carlow today.
He’s with Carlow Development Partnership and is visiting the Clink, Perri’s Warehouse where donations are being left and Carlow College.
Sinéad Burke of KCLR News caught up with hm to find out what he thinks of local efforts:
It’s as a new Rest Centre set up in the community hall in Ballon welcomed its first arrivals from Ukraine yesterday.
A group of 50 landed early Thursday morning, mostly women and children fleeing the war in their home country.
It followed a call to local community groups for appropriate facilities to be made available and the hall in Ballon met the requirements.
Carlow county council Director of Services Padraig O’Gorman says it’s not intended to be a long term accommodation solution, telling KCLR it “Would be short term and that they would move onto their, I suppose, medium-term accommodation, eight of them actually have moved already and there’s another number of them moving today so we would expect then that that would be replenished with new arrivals probably over the weekend”.
Meanwhile, those in Ballon are appealing for the following donations:
For other ways you can assist those hardest hit by the war in Ukraine, click here