Mark Daly (Fianna Fail)
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I apologise for being late for the presentation. I happened to be in Italy last year when High Commissioner Mogherini announced that Operation Mare Nostrum would be abandoned. My first response was that she should resign because she had condemned to death all of those people who were going to make that journey and that is exactly what happened. The European Union's response so far has been appalling, to put it mildly. Emergency meetings have taken two weeks to convene, which is not anyone's definition of an emergency. We have seen barrel bombing and heard about the red line in regard to the gas attacks in Syria but they have led to the refugees ending up in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.

I know personnel who are working on the very intricate system of biometric payments to refugees all over the Middle East who are from Syria. I have read reports - our guests have confirmed this - that in some instances the money for those people in refugee camps has been stopped - in certain cases in the past couple of weeks. This is basically forcing people to travel to Europe. Mr. Andrews may already have supplied an answer to this question during his presentation but what is the cost of looking after Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey? What is the cost of looking after that same refugee in Europe? I presume it is ten times greater. If European powers and countries do not want to do it - and apparently they do not want to look after these refugees - for compassionate and humanitarian reasons, they might do it because of the purely economic argument that it is easier and cheaper to look after them in the displacement camps on the borders of Syria than it is to look at the scenes we are seeing on our TV screens. This is only a crisis for Europe because it is not on our doorstep; it is now inside the borders of Europe. It is simply an economic argument because Europe, as we know, does not really care about a humanitarian crisis. It is only because it is now a political crisis in Europe.