Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the delegation for the presentation and for highlighting this issue, which is both important and fascinating. My constituency clinic comes across issues of this nature quite regularly. In tackling this issue is the best approach to focus solely on the failure to deal appropriately with migrants rather than across the board? I have no doubt that migrants are confronted with specific problems, although I hope it is in a minority of cases in the overall scheme of things that they experience racism. I can think of many other groups who have also experienced discrimination. I refer to sexism, anti-Traveller attitude, racism, just plain old class prejudice, and even not liking the look of someone. All of these factors are there. I stress that they are a minority but none the less, when they happen, which is reasonably regularly and they come to my attention reasonably regularly, they are very disturbing for the people involved. These attitudes are very unfair and are unacceptable. We must do something about it. I wonder whether tactically, is it not better, without exacerbating the problem, to approach it from the point of view of having a certain standard of courtesy and an appropriate interaction with people? This could include the specific issues that may arise with immigrants and with other named groups and it would be a way of providing training to cover over all these areas. This would be preferable to singling out immigrants as having a particular problem because there is a slight danger that such an approach could reinforce the difficulties I have outlined.