Dr. Salome Mbugua:

I want to echo what the Deputy said. It is true that there are many people, especially in the past two years, who have ended up here in Ireland. I spoke earlier about the feeling of powerlessness and lack of agency for most of the people who come because they are kept in a situation of limbo. Work is available in Ireland but the majority of those people have to wait for six months, if the hearing is not negative, to get the right to work. When, after six months, a person gets that right then it takes three months or however many more months for that person to get to use that right and apply for a job.

That creates a lot of powerlessness for people because when they leave their countries of origin because of issues affecting them, they do not want to stay idle because that triggers what has happened before and adds more to their problems and their mental health needs. We have therefore advocated for the right to work from three months because people may have already got used to what is happening in the country by then. Then it may be six months before they get the right to work. That feeling of powerlessness and lack of agency needs to be looked into as to how it impacts people who end up in a country where there are a lot of jobs. We have people here but we do not allow them to work. We keep them waiting, and that affects their mental health. We definitely need to look into that.

We also have to uphold human rights. I am a human rights activist. I am also a commissioner with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and I believe in upholding the rights of people regardless of where they are. We spoke about that earlier. It is a matter of the life experiences of the people we are speaking about. Upholding those human rights is very important. I refer to the basic rights: the right to housing, the right to work, the right to health. I talk about issues faced by Travellers, for example, who are also affected so much by the housing issue. Sometimes we have the money to build these houses, but why are they not built? We again ask ourselves Mr. Reilly's question: where are the priorities we have in place to be able to sort out some of these problems we are talking about? We have the resources but we are not actioning what should happen to be able to overcome these barriers and issues that are affecting the people who are affected by mental health issues.