Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the point of bringing into line how Ukrainians and other asylum seekers are treated. The question is whether we go down to how asylum seekers are treated with inhumanity or go up to how Ukrainians were treated with basic humanity. Sinn Féin and the Government are saying that we should level down to the level of inhumanity. Sinn Féin's position was for the scrapping of direct provision. It was opposed to direct provision, correctly, because it is an inhumane system. It is a profiteering, privatised system and we should treat people with respect. Ireland is a rich country; that is the truth. Ordinary people in this country are not rich and struggle, there is no question about it. However, the scarcity that exists is an artificial one. It is scarcity because of the Government's refusal to tackle the big corporations and its pursuit of a housing policy which is about enriching those who already own property; multiple corporate landlords, private developer and so on. We do have the capacity to say that we will provide a basic standard of living as we did with Ukrainians. The idea that we should be levelling down is really poor. Moreover, the right to work is going to be a key issue. It was a progressive thing for Ukrainians that they could come in, get a PPS number and be given the right to work.

If we listen to people who are complaining, or raising questions about centres of asylum seekers, they often talk about single men. People often say that the men will be just hanging around because they have nothing to do. These people would like to work and contribute to our society. They would like to earn a wage. It is true now that after six months they can work, which is better than the system we had previously, but we should have a system where we give people access to the labour market very quickly. This would mean a reversal of the view which sees people coming here as being a burden that we are unable to take. Instead, we could see that people are coming in here with skills and talents that we need for our health service, construction industry and public services, all the different things that we need in our society.

It is a little bit similar to the pandemic unemployment payment. For a moment, members of the Government thought, "Jesus, people like me could end up unemployed. What would be the minimum I would need to survive?". The idea of €350 came about. The same kind of thing happened with Ukrainian refugees. All of a sudden, refugees were not people who had a different skin colour or were coming from a different continent. These were European and white and we thought about how we could treat people who were fleeing a horrible war. A basic model, which has some elements of humanity in it was created. That was the glimpse of people here asking themselves how they would like to be treated if there was war here and they fled to another place and were traumatised. That is what we came up with for the Ukrainians.

Instead of scrapping that and bringing them down to the level of how all other asylum seekers are treated, that is what we should have done; we should have considered how people should be treated. There is a problem with the Government talking about how it is levelling it because it does not want to create a pull factor. This is playing into the idea that this is what is happening here and that people are coming here because of our very generous system, and so on. That is a mistake. We should treat people with humanity. A famous quote attributed to Tony Benn states that if you see how a government treats refugees, that is how it would treat you if it could get away with it. For a moment, Ukrainians were treated with a level of decency and now that is being done away with. We should all be standing together and opposing the levelling down of Ukrainians and fighting for the levelling up and equalisation of other asylum seekers. For that reason, I will be voting against this legislation.

See this speech in context