Lynn Ruane (Independent)
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As a new member of the committee, I will let Deputy Gannon away with how much time he took. I apologise; I have a clash at this time so I was at the justice committee. I am sorry I missed people's opening statements. I have lots of questions going in different directions so I will try to keep the ones that are similar together. One of them relates to direct provision. With the White Paper, we thought we were starting to move towards the ending of direct provision. People were eager to see how that was going to play out and eager to see an end to that system but then the unimaginable happened and we are back in a situation where we are nearly saying we need more direct provision. It is not that we need more direct provision but we need to be able to accommodate people. I and many others want adequate housing, own-door accommodation and all of those things but we want that to be State provided. We found ourselves in this emergency and there is a dichotomy between the use of these private facilities versus us wanting a public model where people are housed. Is there something in between those two things that we have not yet explored in a moment of crisis? I do not know if any of the witnesses have much knowledge of this so I would like to hear if they do. I am thinking of the likes of the Dídean model. I do not know if they know it. In communicating with that organisation and looking at the kind of work it is doing, it does not feel like it is private and it does not feel like it is fully public. There is some sort of a social enterprise model there that has potential to provide own-door accommodation but that also has supports on-site in terms of access to social workers, literacy supports, supports from a county council and support with all the different forms. There is some sort of integrated approach or a community development-style approach within that accommodation in Dídean. Do any of the witnesses have a comment on that model? Is it something that should be invested in and expanded? It potentially could not be done without some private investment. That is where the problem comes in because you do not want to be increasing the private investment again. It feels like that is a good model but how do you actually replicate that without any private investment, even if it is a social enterprise-style private investment? That is one question.

The other question fits into what Deputy Gannon was saying about the filling out of forms. Has Mr. Collins had any experience with this? If I was going somewhere and someone told me "you should say this because then they will leave you alone" I would say "okay". There is an inflexibility in not allowing people to process their scenarios and think about what they are saying, even with the language and all of that. In my office, we have been trying to look at how many people have been refused asylum or refused at some stage of the process based on sexuality. With regard to credibility, we have been hearing that people have been asked whether they have had sexual intercourse with somebody of the same sex, whether they have gone to a gay nightclub or if they have a boyfriend or girlfriend. All of a sudden, somebody's sexuality is not about them having an internal sexuality but somehow about having an experience of that sexuality in the world, which seem like two very different things. Have any of the witnesses come across people being refused because of their sexuality being questioned under the credibility grounds, based on a quite awful line of questioning and determining what someone's sexuality is?

Another of my questions relates to integration. Maybe Ms McGinley can answer this. Sometimes it seems we have not fully grasped what integration means. At the community level, sometimes we think integration just means someone is part of the community or is going to the same school. It is not actually full access to their fundamental rights, whether it be health, employment or all those things. I also look at it through the lens of service provision. I note it is 20 years on from me working in the addiction sector and it is still extremely white. That is not without people saying they are struggling to make their services culturally appropriate. There is a fear around suggesting service provision for particular things, whether it is health related, community related or in relation to addiction. We have a huge eastern European population who have huge needs with regard to addiction but they do not have their own services set up. Is integration just someone having access to all their needs being met on a human rights basis and all those things or is it that they are having their needs met with the general population within the existing services? Do we need to heavily resource culturally appropriate services run by particular communities or nationalities for their own people?

On the other hand, would that be a further separation of people in communities? I am wondering about this aspect because I feel like we are failing time and again to make our services places where people want to come if they are not white and Irish. I am asking this question in order that I can understand the position. All of the witnesses should feel free to comment on it.

I have an observation regarding the consultation aspect. Consultation is a cosmetic thing that people are referring to. A consultation can be done here and now, but governments have had decades to invest properly in communities, systems, etc. In this context, consultation is just pretending that we are talking to people, when, in reality, their situation is not going to change. We are just going to say we have consulted, and we focus too much on this idea of consultation rather than investment in communities, the asylum process and all these things. These protests, especially in working class communities, would not be happening if people were feeling safe in their own lives in a general sense. People are now taking this lack of safety and placing the responsibility on another group, as if those other people had somehow caused the lack of safety. In reality, years and years of oppression, structural violence and inequality have caused this lack of safety.

Should we begin to move away from this false idea that consultation is somehow going to solve something? I say this because after the consultation, the people in the room being consulted will still be living in poverty, still be on low wages, still have poor access to adequate healthcare and will still be involved with structures such as Tusla, etc. These people are not in a good situation and consultation does not solve the problem. In the context of this firefighting process, are we doing enough to demand better investment in communities so people can live safely and happily side by side and not see the other as some sort of threat to their means? Obviously, they are not. This is more of an observation on my part. It is a bit naïve when people keep referring to consultation. What is it for, after all? It does not actually achieve anything in the end.