Noel Grealish (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will be very brief as I am conscious of the time. The Minister is aware that I visited the Middle East in a private capacity last year. I visited the refugee camps in north Lebanon, in which there were mostly Christian Syrians who were forcefully driven out of their homes by ISIS. ISIS came into their town overnight and a cross was painted on the door just because they were Catholic. They were given three options: convert to Islam, learn the Koran or be shot. I met one family in which the son-in-law refused to comply, and ISIS assassinated him there and then in front of the family. These people were thrown out of their houses there and then with just the clothes on their backs and told to leave. They are now in refugee camps in north Lebanon. They do not want to come to Ireland. They do not want to leave their home town. They want to go back home to their countries and live where they were born and reared. These are middle-class families who worked exceptionally hard and, just because of what has happened overnight, they are now in a refugee camp in Lebanon.

In the course of that same trip, I attended a conference in Beirut at which we were told that, despite the birth of Christianity in the Middle East, if this trend continues, there will be no Christian left in the Middle East. Where in Iraq there were 2.2 million Christians, now there are fewer than 200,000. It is the same in Syria. Is enough being done at EU level to protect these people in the Middle East? What is being done by the EU about ISIS? ISIS must be stopped. What I saw in Lebanon is horrendous: hundreds of people crammed into little rooms just because they were Christian, just because they practise a particular religion. I know this happens to people of other religions, but the EU must get together with the Americans and Russians or whoever in the Middle East. Everybody must work together to stop the spread of ISIS. We see what ISIS is doing and the threat they represent around the world. Global co-operation is needed and the EU should lead it. I would like to hear what is being done at EU level in this regard.