Marian Harkin (Sligo-Leitrim, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair and the witnesses for coming today. I missed some of their contributions, although I quickly scanned their documents earlier. Unfortunately, I was held up with local issues which were also about migration. It is in all of our inboxes and telephone calls these days.

To come back to what we are discussing here today, I had a look at the votes in the European Parliament. Some of those votes were very close and some were nearly defeated. Having spent 15 years in the European Parliament, I am aware that votes can sometimes be defeated by those on what we might call the right or the left - I will not talk about the hard left, right or otherwise. Together they can sometimes defeat votes. It nearly happened with some of these votes. It is widely believed that if we did not have something in place before the European elections, the Commission and others would be very concerned about what the outcome of the elections might be.

I have significant reservations about this pact from Ireland's perspective. The witnesses made very strong statements today that they oppose every aspect of it. There is no part of the pact that is more positive than negative and that leads me to believe that the witnesses think Ireland should remain as it is and have its own migration policy. That was already partly interrogated earlier. We face a binary choice; we cannot opt for bits of this or that. As politicians, we face a binary choice and so do our witnesses, although I am not telling them their business.

Do the witnesses really believe the regression of people's rights within the pact is such that they think we would be better under current circumstances than working with our EU partners? As I said, I have significant concerns but sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture and look at outcomes and what the outcomes of decisions might be. That is my first question.

It looks as if Ireland might have upwards of 20,000 asylum seekers this year if numbers continue as they have in the first three months of this year. Have any of the witnesses' groups done any analysis on the number of migration officials, legal experts, legal counselling and the kind of resources we will need to manage that?

We asked the Minister about resources in the context of the solidarity mechanism and whether any analysis had been done. We could not get a satisfactory answer. When people speak to me, they ask about cost. They say there is a budget coming up and they ask how much of the budget needs to be diverted to manage the circumstances we find ourselves in. The first was a comment, which nobody has to respond to, and the second was my question.