Colm Brophy (Dublin South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will pick up from Deputy Lisa Chambers where she left off as I do not believe we received a very satisfactory answer to this question.

I totally accept that when a public representative such as myself is contacted, it is usually because there is an issue. There are plenty of cases where someone is not contacted and things work perfectly, but I do not think the general experience of a lot of people who are looking for a visa to come into Ireland for a short-stay holiday tallies with what the service is telling us. I regularly hear of people who experience inordinate delays and difficulties in obtaining a visa to come here for an event, to join a family member or for a short stay.

Was it a policy to say insufficient documentation or evidence had been provided with an application? Was this ever suggested as a way of giving a holding reply to applicants and delay applications owing to the overall volume of applications received? I know of people who had been granted a visa to visit the country multiple times in the past but who received such a reply to a visa application in the past 12 months. I do not understand how somebody could have applied in 2016 to come to Ireland and again, using the same process, in 2017 and who booked tickets with the expectation that the result could be told "No." Have the process been changed? I refer specifically to applications received from Thailand where people seem to be told, almost as a standard response, that they have provided insufficient documentation. It strikes me that the system is overburdened and one is reaching for a handy reply. I could cite specific cases in which people lost bookings and airline tickets and had to rebook at inordinate cost, but they were bona fide cases. The State and the agency decided on previous occasions that there was no problem with the people in question coming here; therefore, I am at a loss to understand how decisions are being made. There also seems to be a problem with applications from India which also seem to have been stalled.

I accept the principle that there is nothing inherently wrong with the State having a business evaluation scheme in place, like most western European countries. However, there is always something about such a scheme that attracts a certain type of investment and it often involves aspects of European Union residency rules, with Ireland being very valuable in that context, but it needs to be ultra transparent. The Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service has no defence for a lack of transparency. If there is a risk element to an investment scheme of this type, given the motives there might be to invest in it, the agency providing the service should be completely transparent.

Mr. Kirrane spoke about investment in the hotel industry in the early days. Before I was elected to Dáil Éireann, my business was tangentially involved in the hospitality sector. Anything that distorts a market and, for example, allows an influx of money to give one group a competitive advantage over another in buying up hotels around the country should be known about and transparent. There is anecdotal evidence of an influx of Chinese money to buy into hotel projects in Ireland, preventing Irish indigenous operators from purchasing or competing. Under a crazy tax scheme 15 years ago, hotels were being built in every second town that were never going to be economically sustainable. I do not care about the fact that they went out of business because they were never economically viable, but they wiped out a generation of Irish hotel and hospitality people and thousands of jobs in good, strong, family-run hotels because they could not compete with new ones which were never going to be viable. I would hate to think money came in under this scheme that might be involved in that type of investment, although there is some indication that it did. I ask the delegates to consider that aspect. As Senator Martin Conway said, no one is asking the service to publish a business scheme, but if money is coming in, we should know where it is going. We should know who is on a committee that is making decisions and we should know who are investing. If they do not like our terms and conditions, they should go and find another country.