The North Cork town of Buttevant is preparing to welcome a further 60 Ukrainian refugees tonight.
40 woman and young children already arrived at the old convent on the main street of Buttevant in the early hours of this morning.
The convent building will serve as a rest centre to temporarily house the refugees, who had all been travelling for numerous days.
However, the convent has not been lived in for several years - so a large team of volunteers has been working around the clock to make the building suitable for habitation.
A mass local effort means that in less than 24 hours, donations have furnished the empty convent.
The community council is still appealing for shelving and food donations.
Speaking to RedFM News, one of the volunteers from the Buttevant community, Terri O'Gorman said that the community response has been phenomenal:
"The Community Council put out a call last night for people to give a hand so a lot of people joined in and, just, it's been amazing here. Cleaning, getting beds ordered, getting beds made, lifting beds upstairs into the old convent in Buttevant, which had been empty for a while, so it needed to be cleaned and aired and heating had to be sorted out. So people came with duvets and towels and pillows, clothes and food. It's just been amazing. Oh my God! Everybody has been so good. People dropping off stuff, people coming in helping with sorting it out, because you can imagine, bags of stuff and it just has to be all sorted into different piles for different age groups. The response from the community has been phenomenal."
