Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour)
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Unfortunately I must leave the meeting after this contribution. On international protection, I was disappointed with the Minister's comments last weekend on deportation. What we are witnessing around the country is people standing outside centres saying "Burn them out". Black kids are getting abuse at bus stops. There are people in my constituency who work in Beaumont Hospital and who are afraid to go home. There is a rise in incidents of racial tension and racial abuse. There are accusations that women and children are not safe because migrants are coming into an area. There are videos of buses at Santry Park which are purported to be full of migrants going to different parts of the country. There are bizarre reports of attacks on women at Howth Junction DART station, purported to be done by migrants in recent times even though it happened three years ago.

Does the Minister not feel that at this point we need a Covid-style response by the Government to such misinformation? During the Covid pandemic when the Government was at the forefront of that information campaign, we flooded the airwaves and were able to tell everybody what it was, how to protect oneself, and what it was not. Public representatives were involved in giving people solid information. The anti-vaccine and anti-mask movement really did not get as much of a hold as it possibly could have. There is, however, a massive information vacuum from the Minister's Department and from other Departments that work in this area around telling people exactly what international protection is, what the nature of the accommodation is, and the statistics around crime and housing and so on. If such information were provided in a positive way, it could dispel all of these myths being put forward.

I do not want to live in a city that I do not recognise anymore. I grew up in a country where we could go all over the world and nobody wanted to come here. Now people are here because they want to come here and it is an attractive place to come. It is a free country. It has changed so much in my lifetime. All members here have family all over the world. When I ask schoolchildren if they watched the World Cup final, and they said that they did, I ask them if they saw the guy playing for Argentina with the Irish name. Is that not mad? We are everywhere. The audacity of Irish people to suggest that somebody else is not welcome here, or wherever, regardless of the fact that we have a robust process, suggests that we are in a massively dangerous moment, particularly in light of what is being shouted at people, what has been said to people and the atmosphere that is being created. There are children at these protests and children chanting things outside these centres where people live. Children are chanting these things.

It is not good enough for the Government to talk about deportations because it says to people that they are kind of right that a lot or some of these people are bogus. When the Taoiseach does something similar, other voices say other things. We need to have within the Vote, using the money being proposed here, a robust information campaign. If a kid is afraid to sit at a bus stop because of the colour of his or her skin and due to the atmosphere that is being created, that is an appalling vista which I do not recognise as being Irish. This was what we used to think happened elsewhere, but now it is here and it is real. What am I to say to someone of a migrant background who works all day at Beaumont Hospital - who worked all the way through the pandemic and is already working in a stressful situation - when he or she does not want to walk home?

The point is that this is a crossroads in Irish society. I apologise to the Acting Chairman as I know I am taking up a longer amount of time. The only other time I have come across this before was during the citizenship referendum in 2004. It was poisonous. It was dirt poisonous. Things were allowed to be said and lies were allowed to propagate. It was just wrong. It happened in the teeth of a local and European election. Now it is back, 20 years later. I am more worried about this than I have been about a lot of other things in the past. Will the Minister please give me some comfort that the information flow from the Government is going to be huge, that the calling out of racism is going to be huge, and that the Government will be all over this festering poison, which is taking root and going mainstream? My time with the Department of Justice was brief enough, but the unsympathetic view from some within the Department at that time was "the more you do that, the more you will get". The view then was that we needed to make sure we did not have a pull factor. I hope it has changed. I know there is a new Department dealing with it. I have made my points, and I thank the Acting Chairman.