Ms Edel McGinley:

I thank the Chair and members for the invitation to come before them today. I am the director of the MRCI. I am joined by Mr. Neil Bruton, who is our campaigns co-ordinator.

For more than 20 years, MRCI has been working with migrant workers in precarious and low-wage sectors of the labour market. We work with people coming to Ireland to care for our loved ones, people to work on farms and keep meat processing factories running, those who take on the dangerous work in the fishing industry, people who help in kitchens in restaurants and those who clean hotel rooms and keep Irish hospitality running, among others. Last year, we provided more than 4,500 casework supports and information to people from 119 different nationalities. Our work focuses on the intersection of immigration and the labour market.

We are here to ask the committee to take action on some targeted and concrete integration measures. We call on the committee to ensure that an approach is adopted that supports the integration of the entire immigrant population in Ireland.

Integration is about ensuring that people who make Ireland home enjoy the same experience and set of basic rights as everybody else. Equality of rights are key indicators of integration. Key sites of integration include employment, education, health, housing and social and political participation.

I want to highlight significant structural barriers to integration for thousands of people coming to work in Ireland through the employment permits system. Almost 40,000 employment permits were issued in 2022. Net migration stood at 61,100 in April 2022. The migrant pay gap stood at 22% less an hour than Irish nationals. Over the past 18 months, the Government has extended general employment permits to care and home care workers, meat workers, construction workers, healthcare assistants, haulage drivers, dairy workers, and bus and coach drivers. This trend is set to continue.

Integration must be about protecting people from exploitation in their work and ensuring workers have the ability to stand up for their rights. Integration must be about ensuring workers have their family with them and that those family members have their basic set of rights met too. However, Ireland continues to operate an unfair two-tier employment permit system and does not provide the same rights to everyone coming here to work. Workers recruited into essential jobs on general employment permits cannot freely change employers for five years, which leads to poor standards and exploitation. It is also very hard for general employment permit holders to bring family here and, even if they can, there is no right for those family members to work. This is in stark contrast to workers on critical skills employment permits who can work in any job after two years and can bring their family immediately - and those family members have the right to work. Why is a person who provides care for our loved ones or puts food on our tables treated differently to an IT developer or an engineer? If we do not act, we are going to create division and conflict in workplaces.

We ask that the committee to write to the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment in support of the introduction of a simple and flexible notification process that would allow employment permit holders to easily change employers, as part of the Employment Permits Bill currently going through the Dáil. We also ask the committee to write to the Ministers for Justice and Enterprise, Trade and Employment calling for immediate family reunion rights for all workers on employment permits and to call for the right to work for family members of all employment permit holders. This should be part of the interdepartmental working group that commences this year.

In tandem wit this, integration must be about ensuring that all members of society have access to adequate resources and that there is a planned and whole-of-government approach to deliver in this regard. The strongest defence against attempts to polarise and cause division by far-right actors is strong community leadership and resilience. Unfortunately, the decimation of the community sector has led to fragmented approaches and responses across the country to long-term integration. The Government must seek an approach to equip local communities to respond effectively to support all people who are newly arriving to Ireland and those who have been living here for some time. Right now, we need strong engagement and problem-solving across all sectors, brave political leadership, progressive State policies and community-led solidarity to respond to people who want to divide us. This includes Government and political communications that avoid repeating and feeding far-right narratives but centres progressive narratives, which are reinforced by progressive policies that advance equality, rights and inclusion.

We ask the committee to write to the Taoiseach to ask him to develop a new and whole-of-government approach in the context of the rapid accommodation of people seeking refuge and to engage communities as core stakeholders, conducting resource analysis and centring rapid planning processes. We ask the committee to write to the Taoiseach to appoint a national lead to drive an emergency response to people seeking refuge in Ireland. In addition, we ask the committee to write to the Taoiseach to urgently rebuild the community sector and critical community work approaches by re-establishing a national community development programme across the country to engage host and new communities on issues that affect their lives.