Mr. Justice Bryan McMahon:

I will not repeat what Mr. O'Neill has said but I agree with most of it. The location of centres is a very important factor. It is important for the availability of work but also for the equality agenda. Were one to be placed in north Cork or west Mayo, that might make it much more difficult for a person to be gainfully employed in work than in some place near a centre of tourism or an urban centre. That is a fact of life. It did not make the same impact when the right to work was denied to everyone, but now that it is available, proximity to work is important. It should be remembered that there is currently full employment in the State. This morning I heard on the radio that unemployment is down to 4.6%, which economists classify as full employment. There is no shortage of jobs in the economy. Rather it is where they are. I also agree that location is very difficult for people when they must visit Dublin for meetings. We have heard stories of single mothers, for instance, who had to travel to Dublin to do an interview and so had to take the children out of school on that day and travel up on public transport on very limited resources to do so. I agree with the Deputy and with Mr. O'Neill that more interviews should be done locally in these cases.

As for predictions, who knows? I drew attention to the cases that had occurred in the world in the four years since 2015. Having said that, the figures we predicted for this year were an overshoot. We predicted that more people would come here than did so this year. We should get over the idea that everyone who was dislocated, the 68 million people in the world, want to come to Ireland. It might be a last resort for them, or it might be a first resort.

The view of the Irish public of direct provision is as Deputy Ó Laoghaire stated it. It needs to change now. Four years since the report, people ought to review the system. There will still be people against direct provision as a model but it is not as bad as it was and it is a good deal better than it was, and that should be said. What is the alternative? To quote the politicians, we are where we are. If the Deputy can get me a better model at the same money, I will certainly approve of it.