Mr. Peter Sutherland:

I thank the committee for this opportunity and I will begin with some preliminary observations. It is very important that we draw a distinction between refugees and economic migrants. Refugees are people who are trying to escape from persecution, as defined under the 1951 convention and supplemented by subsequent protocol. The reality is every member state of the European Union has agreed it has an obligation to accept those who seek sanctuary and who are refugees. A great number, perhaps 40%, of those who recently died in the Mediterranean were refugees. The refugees come from Syria or Eritrea in particular, Syria in the main, and they are entitled to refuge. The rest of those who cross the Mediterranean are economic migrants who seek a better life, and come from conditions of great poverty and distress but not persecution. The distinction between the two is important to bear in mind at the outset. In 2014 more than 276,000 irregular migrants crossed the Mediterranean. Irregular migrants are those who do not come with an agreed acceptance from the European Union in the first instance and most of these are simply seeking a better way of life.

I will focus on refugees in the first instance. The obligation we have, and which the European Union has a role in harmonising, has not been fulfilled by many of the member states, including Ireland, with regard to the number of refugees we have taken, for example, from Syria. A number of countries have taken significant steps to take in migrants who are refugees and they do not merely fulfil their obligation but perhaps surpass it. These include Germany, Sweden, Italy and Hungary, which have been mentioned. Germany and Sweden in particular are exceptional in terms of the numbers they have taken. The Italian contribution, and I do not say this because I am in the presence of the ambassador - I was in Rome last week with two of the Ministers from departments concerned with this - has been enormously constructive through Mare Nostrum, which was intended to save lives and succeeded in doing so. The Italian navy continues, notwithstanding the fact that Mare Nostrum no longer functions as such, to save far more lives, in fact ten times more lives, than Frontex and Triton, which are the EU mechanisms for saving lives in the Mediterranean. Italy has played a very important role.

It is important to say Italy dedicated its navy to saving lives. The recent decision by the EU Council, and the ten point plan which preceded it, and I will put this bluntly, represents more of an obsession with stopping smugglers and traffickers and, incredibly, sinking boats that might try to bring people across the Mediterranean than with saving lives. It has increased the amount of money available for the process of saving lives and for the substitution of Mare Nostrum with an EU collaboration, including Ireland, but it does not give anything as much, I believe, as the Commission would have wished.

I want to draw a distinction between the Commission and the member states. The member states have, under the treaty, an intergovernmental responsibility in this area and the responsibility and authority of the Commission is extremely limited. I am not an automatic advocate of favourable comment on the Commission, but for years it has produced papers on what could or should be done about migration and it has been ignored. A significant number of member states, and I am proud to say Ireland is not one of them, are so focused on the short-term negativism of accepting migrants that they effectively block any movement to ameliorate the position as it is today. We have seen this in the island nearest to us. The United Kingdom has great difficulties in discussing this issue, and this is shared by many others. Now we have the rising spectre of Le Pen in France and Wilders in the Netherlands. Even traditionally liberal societies such as Denmark and the Netherlands have political issues with this particular problem, which makes forward mobility on the issue difficult.

What should be done? There is no silver bullet to the issue of the huge number of people from Africa, Asia and the Middle East who might like to live in Europe. There is no simple answer of opening borders and finding a solution which everybody can immediately accept and agree.

Unfortunately, regardless of whether we like it, we have to move incrementally, step by step, and improve what we have. We must improve the numbers we are taking, both the refugees we are obliged to take and economic migrants we actually need because of the demographic challenges much of Europe, although not particularly Ireland, as the ambassador said, is facing.

We also need to agree things at European level. For example, there should be some quota distribution of refugees based on objective criteria such as GDP per capita, total population or a combination of both. There should be a fair distribution, as otherwise we will inevitably find ourselves in a position where many countries, some of which are represented here, will simply receive hundreds of thousands - I will not use terms that will inflame public debate - or very large numbers of migrants that they will simply wave through.

Second, we need joint processing of refugee applications. This is more difficult to achieve because the laws of various countries are different. We probably need to process in a different way and jointly the applications of individuals who claim to be refugees and are, therefore, escaping persecution.

Third, we have to look at whether some of this processing could take place in more remote destinations, that is, outside the European Union. For example, would it be possible for the European Union to consider establishing in countries such as Egypt a processing centre or a mechanism to process asylum applications? These applications could be shared out, rather than forcing people at enormous cost to travel across the Mediterranean in boats that are capable of sinking and resulting in the horrendous number of deaths we are seeing on a yearly basis, a multiple of the number following the sinking ofTitanicbut which receives far less publicity.

There are things that should and can be done. With others, we can do more than what we are doing. We are fortunate in Ireland that our political class, represented at this committee, does not contain the rabid, anti-immigrant minority parties evident elsewhere. That is good and understandable because, regrettably, this is a country which over a period of 100 years has provided more emigrants per capitathan most in other parts of the world.

As regards leadership, I am not suggesting Ireland has not played a constructive role, but I think it can do more, particularly in dealing with asylum seekers.