Jim Walsh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Excuse me because I am a little hoarse but I will be brief. Like others, I commend the Minister on his role in the talks in the North but I would go further. His advent to the office has heralded a keener and renewed interest in and engagement with the North of Ireland. I commend the Minister in that regard. He has done well on other issues too in the Department of Foreign Affairs. He was a very good appointment and I do not say it to patronise him. Perhaps I am doing it to soften what I will say to him now.

I sat in these rooms for a number of years as a member of the committee which looked at Mr. Justice Barron's report on the victims and how they were treated.

We concluded that the Irish State had failed the victims and that is in our report. That was a joint committee report made up of people from the Minister's party, my party and others, including Independents. We felt the legacy issue would be an integral part of this agreement. To me, it should be a red-line issue. It is to the shame of Sinn Féin, the SDLP and the Government that we did not make it a red-line issue. By not doing so, we are in our own way co-operating with the continued collusion of the British authorities in these events. There is no doubt in my mind or our report that the collusion went to a very high level and even to the top of the British Administration, and that is why it is not being released. Does the Minister agree with our report in saying the State has failed the victims and we are continuing to do that?

An unrelated matter has not yet come up. I have heard from the Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament that on 5 November, the first committee of the UN General Assembly passed a resolution that included establishing an open-ended working group, OEWG, to work on legal measures to achieve a nuclear weapon-free world and other measures that would contribute towards that. What active role will Ireland play in supporting that and building the necessary political cohesion for effective measures proposed by the OEWG?

My last area deals with migration. I have three short questions relating to that. I thank the Minister for his very comprehensive report covering a range of issues and particularly this important area. He mentioned the 60 million displaced people, which is an appalling vista if we think about it, who are suffering terribly right across the globe, especially in the Middle East. The Minister mentioned sub-Saharan Africa. The Vice Chairman accompanied me to a seminar I attended recently in Luxembourg with an address from Ms Federica Mogherini, who is a very impressive lady. If I recollect them correctly, the statistics indicated that much African migration is to Europe, with 20% of Africans migrating. That is a very high figure. Given that the population of Africa will grow to more than 1 billion in the next few decades, that will pose a great challenge. What preparation is being put in place at a European level to deal with it?

On page 3-----