Joe O'Reilly (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the ambassador. The main purpose of my words is to be associated with all my colleagues in expressing our sympathy and solidarity with the ambassador, our support for him, and our abhorrence of the shocking events in the ambassador's country recently. Paris is a very beautiful city. It is the centre of high culture in our continent. It has given us tremendous art, music and manifestations of culture and a beautifully free-spirited, happy, liberated city, which is also architecturally splendid. Such a desecration of the city and its wonderful, gentle people is horrendous and it evokes great feelings of sympathy and solidarity in all of us. That is the important thing all our colleagues want to say to the ambassador, and it is the reason I and everyone else indicated to speak. We are horrified by the attacks on his wonderful country and its great people, with its tremendous traditions in terms of enlightenment, democracy and liberty. It is a horror.

The first thing I want to say to the ambassador is that we all have to support a strong security response. We all have to pool information and putting resources into a mutually supportive response, right across Europe. It must also be an instant response. Any remotely significant intelligence should be shared and there should be absolute mutual co-operation at a security level. We would have to take a very hard look at the people who have gone to fight in Syria and who are understood to have become radicalised in that process and we would have to look at passports here, at security and at intelligence-gathering in this area. There has to be a very strong response in that sphere. The ambassador would be as anxious as any of us to have it on the record that we value our excellent Muslim community and it is not that we support any form of Islamophobia. The condemnation of Islamophobia and a desire for a very severe, stern and strong response are not mutually exclusive, and we should be unequivocal about that. The ambassador can take it that he will have absolute support from this country and from all organs of Government and State. Apart from the fact that we are mutually dependent in this area and we have a mutual interest here, we have an objective horror of what has happened to his wonderful country.