Up to 200 Ukrainian refugees will move into emergency accommodation at the Sports Ireland campus in Abbotstown on Thursday.
Many of the refugees have been staying in student accommodation which is now needed as the new university year begins.
The refugees will be accommodated in the National Indoor Athletics Training Centre for up to six weeks until more permanent accommodation is found for them.
The centre will be off-limits to athletes during this period.
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Some asylum seekers who have recently arrived into the State have been sleeping rough due to a shortage of accommodation.
The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth confirmed that accommodation available to the department “reached capacity last week” as a result of the “sustained high number of people seeking accommodation”.
“As a result of this, available accommodation had to be prioritised for international protection applicants with specific vulnerabilities,” a spokeswoman for the department said.
The Irish Refugee Council (IRC) said it was assisting a group of some 27 people in trying to find accommodation as of late afternoon on Wednesday. A spokeswoman said these numbers will “likely increase as the day progresses”.
“However, we are a small NGO and charity who do not have the resources to provide accommodation for protection applicants. We hope that the Sport Ireland Campus at Abbotstown in Dublin which is being prepared will be ready today,” the spokeswoman said.
While there had been situations before where protection applicants could not immediately be placed in reception centres, temporary alternatives were usually provided, the IRC spokeswoman said.
“To have the State totally failing to provide protection applicants with anywhere else to sleep but the streets, in this weather, is unprecedented.”
The situation represented a “breakdown” in Ireland’s reception of people seeking protection and was “deeply concerning and unacceptable”, she added.
The State has legal obligations to uphold the right to asylum and reception and was “currently in breach of the reception conditions directive”.
Media consultant Tom McEnaney, who has been involved in bringing approximately 1,000 Ukrainian refugees to Ireland, accused local authorities of being either incompetent or indifferent in their approach to refugees.
He was responding to Government data that shows that 85 per cent of properties pledged for use by Ukrainian refugees and given to local authorities to fill have not been brought on stream.
Mr McEnaney cited the example of a Ukrainian mother with a disabled daughter who had just been moved to bunk beds in the corridor of the accommodation centre in Carlow and also a Ukrainian woman in Athenry who was sharing a bed with two children in Loughrea, Co Galway.
Mr McEnaney, who has brought refugees to Ireland by road and by air, said he believed local authorities have had ample time to process the offers of accommodation and have not done so to date. “Have councils made unofficial decisions that they are not going to help refugees and if so why? Is it incompetence or is it that they just don’t want refugees in their county?”
Since February, almost 37,500 people who have fled the crisis in Ukraine have sought accommodation from the State, alongside 15,000 international protection applicants currently requiring accommodation.
This means the department is now accommodating more than 51,000 people, compared with 7,500 this time last year.
