Mr. Richard King:

I thank the Chairman and members for meeting us today. We are part of Crosscare. Crosscare is a social support agency of the Dublin Catholic archdiocese which has supported Irish emigrants for over 75 years. We were officially established as Emigrant Advice in 1987, and about ten years ago changed our name to Crosscare Migrant Project and we have continued to support both those leaving and coming home. We are here to discuss the findings of our report "One Hundred Thousand Welcomes?". We present this report as a contribution to the implementation of Ireland’s diaspora policy, in particular the aim to reduce barriers for returning emigrants.

In the past few years the discourse around returning home has begun to identify the experience as one of ‘re-emigration’ – a very demanding move, as significant as leaving the country, despite the fact that emigrants are "coming home". We found that returning emigrants can face many barriers, and we have a great deal of experience in this area. One of the main barriers we will speak on today is the issue of accessing social protection and safety nets for those who need them on their return. The major issue for them is the habitual residence condition, HRC.

Our work is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, specifically the emigrant support programme. We aim to provide a quality information and advocacy service in particular to those who are vulnerable or marginalised. Through our engagement with the people who use our service, we aim to effect change in the policies that affect migrants and returning emigrants. We have worked extensively for changes to the HRC guidelines for more than ten years. We made a presentation to the committee in 2008. Changes were implemented at that stage that made quite a difference for people returning and we saw a major improvements. However in the past couple of years, issues are beginning to affect people who are returning now. This is important in the context of the wave of people returning. More than 105,000 Irish emigrants have returned home in the past four years. The issue will start affecting more people and we have seen this as a growing trend. The report presents an overview and is evidence based. We hope it will be useful to the Department and to the committee in its role of addressing some of the inconsistencies we have seen in the decision making.

I will now hand over to my colleague, Ms McLaughlin, who has done all the hard work and can talk members through the technical and complex bits.