Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail)
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Someday I will get this right. I hope we do not have to put up with another year of Covid. I have never met Mr. Tyndall in person but I find his media interviews to be compulsive listening and I find his contributions and sound and solid points of view very helpful in this debate. I also acknowledge Mr. Garvey and Ms Joyce. I come from Roscommon, where we have had the emergency reception and orientation centre, EROC, in Ballaghaderreen on one side and on the other the debacle at Rooskey, which is just a couple of kilometres away. I will refer to my cousin, Mary Gallagher, in Ballaghaderreen, who got a lot of national coverage for the way she said that we must welcome people into Ballaghaderreen and look after them. She was helped by many people in the community. At that time, a quotation of hers was used which I came across earlier this morning. She said that if people are driven out of their homes and if one sees a child being picked up out of the clay in Aleppo, how could one say "No."? The vast majority of Irish people feel that way. Ballaghaderreen really shone when it had to shine. It did the right thing.

I very much agree that this cannot be a for-profit scenario. While emergency accommodation is sometimes needed, it gives me a bad feeling to hear anyone talking about making profit when we are talking about human beings. I accept that on some occasions emergency accommodation may be required and that is better to provide for-profit accommodation than to leave people stranded but, certainly in the longer term, people should be accommodated.

I have one or two things to say in that regard. To take Ballaghaderreen, at the time there was a lot of talk suggesting that there would be little grant-aided community schemes to encourage integration. Where are we with that? They do not seem to be there at the moment. Some of the people involved came to meet me a few years ago. They were being moved to housing, which was good, but they were being moved from Roscommon to a house in Donegal. This was one family on their own. They did not want to complain. They were really happy that they were going to be housed but they hoped that, if one of families with which they were friends were to be moved, they could move to a local community together. They had no fear of the Irish community where they were going. That was not the issue. However, any of us might like to have some of our own countrypeople with us.

They were told that was their house in Donegal and they could take it or leave it. Do we have a policy that, where people express a desire that there would be another family house beside them or close to them for contact purposes in that locality, we try to accommodate that?

In Roosky, it was a horrifying situation and it was really annoying that the genuine local community, consisting of 18 different nationalities in that parish, was portrayed in such a manner by extreme people on the left and right, who exploited that situation. It goes back to a point I have argued for quite a while, that it appears to the public that secrecy in relation to putting vast numbers in a hotel, as was happening there, causes a lot of this. If people were engaged through GAA, soccer clubs or community parish groups in advance, much of this would never happen.

Moving a large number of people into a small village does not work and hopefully we will move away from that. There was no proper bus link in Roosky and nothing for those people to do. They had a roof over their head but they were all congregated in a smallish hotel. While some people would say it is good enough that they have a roof over their head, I do not look at it that way. If we are going to take in citizens, we will look after them properly.

There has been a tendency recently in one or two debates I have had where people said the foreigners were taking our houses. I never had a situation in Roscommon County Council where a foreign family was responsible for somebody local not getting a house. It is completely misleading but it is being used more and more. I do not like it. I do not know if any witnesses have a comment on that. Their work is fantastic and well done. It is great to have them before the committee. I look forward to engaging with them more in the future.