Mr. Barry Andrews:

I thank the Chairman and the members for their interest in and continuing work on this issue. There is a strong chance that the situation in Syria will get worse. There have been some minor changes in the complexion of the conflict that could see millions of people moving over the border. Mr. Edgar was in Turkey and Greece recently and was able to identify the people who are leaving Syria, going straight to Greece and trying to get straight through Turkey. They are not stopping there anymore. They never wanted to come to Europe and I think Ms Magennis agreed with me on this. That has been very well documented at this stage. They have been gathering on that border for four years and had it been about pull factors, they would have left a long time ago but they love their country, have ambitions for it and want to go back to networks of family and property and their home, which is something we all take for granted but which is a very powerful thing and that is what they wanted to do. They are real refugees. They are fleeing persecution. They have a well-grounded fear of persecution so under our obligations under UN membership and the Geneva Convention, we must offer asylum to people who are genuine refugees in those circumstances.

In response to Deputy Crowe, our operations are in north-western Syria. We will reach 850,000 people this year through our programmes. It is the largest operation in our history. No Irish people go over the border. We have 650 Syrian staff but no international individuals go over the border now. They operate out of Turkey in terms of remote management with the support of our donors. It is effective up to a point but the Chairman and Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan will recall that when we went there in February, we visited an orphanage where we met children. I referred to one of them in my paper. Many of those children experienced incredible trauma and some of them had not regained the power of speech at the age of three or four as a result of that trauma. The GOAL staff we were with were Syrians. They introduced us to these children and were themselves very moved by the testimony of the workers in the orphanage. That is the reality and Deputy Smith made reference to the fact that eight children per day were killed in May. Another incident occurred in the Mediterranean a week ago where 15 children were drowned, so this is now a daily reality. As we sit here today, more people are getting on to boats. There are people in the middle of the Mediterranean. This is happening right now and it has the potential to get much worse.

I will now deal quickly with a couple of the questions that were posed.

I have referred to the effect of the barrel bombs in the paper. We call them indiscriminate but they are not really indiscriminate; that would suggest that civilians are collateral to some military objective but the civilians are the target. The Assad government has chosen to terrorise civilians into submission through the bombing of market places, bakeries, hospitals, schools and all sorts of civilian infrastructure. It is quite discriminate and the effect of it is unbelievable. That is why GOAL has reluctantly been one of a number of NGOs calling for a no-fly zone to take them out of the air and to decommission the bombs. That is very much a measure of last resort in circumstances where there is absolutely no other political initiative. If there was, it could be left to exhaust itself to see if it could come to some conclusion but there is none. It is a measure of absolute last resort. Will a military intervention solve it? No. Could it be a component or a threat that would bring other belligerents to their senses? It has to be enforced in some way. If there is going to be a safe area to protect civilians and guarantee access of humanitarian aid, that is something that has been done in the past but always in parallel with a political initiative.

Syria, Iraq and Eritrea are the source of the refugees who will come here under the programme but any other refugee who qualifies under the criteria of the Geneva Convention is entitled to asylum in this country because Ireland has signed it.

Senator Walsh raised the issue of ISIS infiltrating the refugee movements. That statement has come from ISIS, which is a terrorist organisation and is deliberately trying to generate fear. In June, the EU anti-terrorism chief said that 4,000 Europeans had joined ISIS so if 1,000 are coming back, there is an issue in Europe that has to be tackled.