Mr. David Turner:

In closing, I will highlight three steps we think the committee could take to begin to address this issue.

The first is to write to the ambassadors of the countries highlighted today - China, India, Iran, Nigeria and Pakistan - to express the committee's concerns about the lack of religious freedom and the attitude of the Governments of those countries towards religious freedom. The committee might felt it right to invite the ambassadors to appear before the committee and to address the concerns we have highlighted.

Second, we would love the committee to write to our Minister for Foreign Affairs to request that the Department make good on its oft-stated commitment to prioritising freedom of religion or belief in our foreign policy by recognising, as we stated earlier, the wide body of evidence showing Christians as the most persecuted religious group in the world and explicitly condemning the persecution of Christians. Our Government has not yet done that. Admittedly - and we are encouraged to see this - our Government does speak up on behalf of religious freedom in general terms, but we would like specific violations of human rights such as have been described today to be explicitly condemned by our Minister for Foreign Affairs. Often Ministers for foreign affairs make major speeches on particular topics to illustrate where Ireland stands on these issues, and we encourage the committee to encourage the current Minister to do that.

Third, we recommend that our Government create a dedicated refugee path with a small annual quota for Christians who have been persecuted for their faith. The genuineness of applicants could be verified by Church in Chains in association with other agencies. The reason we put that recommendation into our written statement is that we know from past experience that sometimes Christians who face persecution are not able to access the UN system in the countries from which they are seeking to flee. We saw that particularly in Iraq, when Islamic State came along in the Nineveh Plains area and Christians, Yazidis and moderate Muslims had to flee for their lives. They ended up in refugee camps run by the UN but, sadly, some of the minorities were discriminated against within those camps and felt so unsafe that they had to leave and be independently supported. It is for people like them we feel a small refugee path could be considered.

We leave that with members and thank the committee once again for the opportunity to bring these issues to its attention.