Maureen O'Sullivan (Dublin Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. The representatives of the earlier group painted a picture of people arriving after giving all their money to get on the boat and then being asked for more money, and the way they could pay this was through donating a kidney or whatever. It is opportune, therefore, that MSF is appearing before us now.

I was fortunate to be able to watch the film last night. I saw in that what the witnesses spoke about today. The witnesses spoke about the range of injuries. Obviously, the physical injuries are dealt with on the spot but there are also psychological effects. There are people who were tortured, sexually violated and raped. Is MSF able to do follow-up work? I realise that must be difficult, but it is aware of the people who need the psychological and mental health care afterwards. It was interesting to see the party after 72 hours and how MSF presented it. When they had gone through the initial trauma they were able to sing and dance on the boat. Human resilience is something else. It appears that these migrants are just left on the boats to drift and that there is nobody in charge of the boats. That is another extremely dangerous situation. When the film showed the middle of the boat beginning to sink one can imagine people's terror that they were going to drown.

Perhaps the witnesses would outline their knowledge of the slave markets in Libya. I raised this as a Topical Issue some time ago. It is incredible that we are relying on Libya to deal with this when the country is in turmoil. It does not have basic necessities for its citizens and its economy is in danger of collapse, yet we have turned to it to deal with it.

Another issue is that when Libya was a very rich country a number of people came to that country to work in the oilfields. We mention them but we need to know more about them. They are mainly from other African countries but at some point they would have had a quite decent standard of living in Libya. They are part of the migrant issue now.

I have a general question about co-ordination of services. The work of Médicins San Frontières is amazing, but there are other organisations in place. Are the organisations coming together on that and on where we go from here? The awful question must be asked: why are people being rescued? I have heard some of them say that they would prefer to die by drowning in the Mediterranean than deal with what some of them are going to face.

The Malta Declaration has great sounding principles regarding building capacity and having adequate reception centres, but there is no doubt that it is a complete failure. To date I have counted €120 million and €90 million going to it and I am sure there is a great deal more, but it is not addressing the needs it should be addressing. I believe the money could be given to MSF because it would be done in a more humane way. We wrote to the previous Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade asking that this be raised, as he was attending that foreign affairs Council meeting in Europe. We do not hear concerns at European level that funding is going into the abuse and torture of people and making life much worse for them. We know the root causes of many people leaving their countries but they are ending up in a much worse situation. The coastguards need training but I am also sure there are rogue coastguards who have no interest in training and who are using this situation for themselves.