John O'Donoghue (Kerry South, Fianna Fail)

It is most important that our citizenship and immigration laws are respected and upheld. When they are consistently breached and abused, a fertile seed for racism is sown.

Whether people like it or not, there has been a change in migration flows throughout the world. The whole question of immigration will become more of an issue in the coming years. No one should be under the illusion that this referendum will be a panacea, as it cannot resolve all of the problems regarding this issue. It must be remembered that hundreds of thousands of people are coming from other jurisdictions into the EU. Many of those people are facilitated by ruthless gangs. The consequences of these gangs' actions were seen in County Wexford some years ago. Admittedly, the majority of asylum seekers in the EU are at the coalface of human misfortune. However, there are no circumstances under which a country of this size can accommodate all those people coming into the EU or even a significant percentage thereof.

There have been calls for simplistic solutions such as quotas. The truth is that the immigration and asylum procedures are governed by the Geneva Convention which demands that each country must, of necessity, examine each and every application for asylum. There is only room for clarity and not obfuscation on this issue. When I asked how one would get around this issue, no one could tell me how. There is no utopian solution to the immigration issue or any other issue. States must enact legislation to protect their borders and their social and economic fabrics. Every state is entitled to ensure that it protects the security of its people.

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