Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal North East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The refugee crisis is not recent. Several years ago, I visited refugee camps in Lebanon that had been occupied for decades by Palestinian refugees. These Palestinian refugees were taking in family members who were refugees from Syria. Refugees were taking in refugees. I have seen at first hand the lack of resources provided to Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey which are predominantly dealing with the crisis. The international community failed to support those countries and adequately resource them to deal with refugees. Meanwhile, very wealthy states in the region are taking no refugees and giving no support.

There is a big picture of utter failure internationally to either resource countries who are being very generous or to challenge countries that are not doing anything. In terms of the position here, I welcome the confirmation from the Government that we will take 4,000 refugees in the next few years but I have some concerns. In regard to the first issue, we need to win hearts and minds among our own citizens. Obviously the witnesses have heard the commentary around "we have a housing crisis and we need to address that" or "we still have an unemployment crisis" and so on. We have also heard from President Tusk in his state of the Union address that the EU would provide a subsidy of around €6,000 per refugee and that the Government would then seek to ensure that whatever it spends on the relocation programmes would not be factored into the usual budgetary procedure. In my opinion we can do both. I hold the strong view that we can say to our citizens that we can address the housing crisis, the economic recovery and take a reasonable share of refugees but how does one reassure the citizens listening?