Derek Nolan (Galway West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

We all remember the general election campaign of three years ago. I have never forgotten one image from the campaign that really sticks in my mind. When I was canvassing near Murrough Avenue in Renmore one day, I met a woman in her mid-60s who was looking forward to retiring and having her working life behind her.

She was absolutely distraught. She was crying at the door and her whole sense of purpose had disappeared. She had put her entire savings from the previous 20 years into bank shares as something secure on which she could rely, but everything she had worked for was completely gone. At the time there was a sense of hopelessness in the air and no sense of where we were going. The only view was that things would get worse. We had just lost or sovereignty two months earlier. People's national pride had been damaged by the country being humiliated into seeking emergency assistance. Nobody would lend to us unless we surrendered our sovereignty and committed to a certain course of action. There was a real sense of despair and hopelessness. There was a sense that what was to come could never live up to what we had before and expectations had been dashed.

Three years ago was my first time to run in a general election. The people I met were generally considerably older than me. I felt a great sense of responsibility at that time. I feel we have been vindicated somewhat by what we have managed to do in the past three years. That sense of pure despair and hopelessness has gone. That sense that the country has nowhere to go but down is gone. There is a creeping sense of confidence that while times are still very difficult, hard decisions remain to be made and we are not out of the woods, we can see a way forward.

In this time that we have allotted to discuss the priorities in the year ahead, it is worth looking back over those three years in order to remember what has changed and why things improved. They have improved because considerable work has been done by Government parties and people across the country to pick the country up by its bootstraps and get it standing tall again with a sense of confidence and purpose for the future.

Of course in the past three years the national discourse was dominated by talk of public finances, GDP growth, interest rates, promissory notes, international lenders and ratings agencies - things that do not connect with people struggling to get by in their lives. It is not something people are inclined to worry about or ought to have to worry about because it is something very technical and obscure. Much of the work we had to do was esoteric. It was something that was unique to us and a certain clique of society that is in that world. The average person felt disconnected from that discussion even though what has happened as a result of tackling some of those issues has been extremely powerful and positive.

We are finally starting to see job creation. People can see that the real bread-and-butter issues are taking top priority. We are seeing successes, going from losing 7,000 jobs every month to now creating 5,000 jobs every month. We need to acknowledge that is a major turnaround and will make a huge difference. For every ten jobs we create, seven further jobs are created in the economy and we will start to see that cumulative effect filtering is way through.

I issue a word of warning. While we need to look at how we use those resources, how we ease tax burdens and how we can roll back on some of the draconian measures taken, the national debate in the next two years cannot focus exclusively on who is going to cut how much tax. If we go through three years of hell and dictatorial attitudes from the troika, involving sacrifices of hard decisions, merely to reduce our public debate to one single issue, we will have done the State a severe disservice.

We have so many more things that we now need to discuss with the freedom we have got. What are we going to do with our resources as they improve? How will we improve the lives of children? How will we ensure people do not just have jobs but have well-paid jobs and security for the future? How will we ensure people have pensions on which they can rely? If they are working and paying into a system there needs to be a reward and security for them. How will we have the best education system in the world in order to ensure in the future the jobs in the emerging world economy come to Ireland and do not go to other countries?

How will we ensure we have participation in society such that people feel connected to it? As citizens of Ireland, people should feel that they participate in the economy and society, to avoid what happened before, which was to leave it to the market and allow the clique at the top take the cream and create a society that suits a certain amount of people who have money already. If as happened before the herd mentality comes back and we are all chasing one goal dictated to us by wealthy individuals, lazy media and so on, we will repeat all the mistakes again.

We need to think about the type of economy we want to build. We need to talk about workers and their role in society. We must cherish the human capital that makes our society and put it at the centre. Workers, who every day bring their children to school, go to work and create wealth, must be at the centre of decision making because they are the ones who create the wealth we can then redistribute to other areas of society to fulfil our societal goals.

We need to get real about public services. We need to provide a proper public service and not one that is simply funded to the level we can afford. We need to know what we want to do with it. What do we want its role in society to be? Ireland has never decided if it wants to be a social democratic society or a conservative society. Does it want to have top class public services or not? We need to have that debate and make a decision. We need to be political about it. There is an anti-politics view that we can just leave things out there and not worry about it because things will happen anyway. That is what got us into this mess. We need to make decisions and have a goal as a society. We spent three years with one national priority, to get rid of the troika, and we need to replace it with a new national priority, which is to create something different from that which went before, something we can be proud of and that will live up to the kind of society we ought to have and would like to see for our children and future generations.

However, I will pick one issue which the Government should prioritise and focus on. While I can compliment and commend the Government on all other issues, I have seen little or no progress on this issue. It is not a very popular issue and does not get much discussion in the media or in this House. I refer to the issue of asylum seekers and the immigration system. I am sick to the teeth of meeting individuals with lives, personalities and families, hopes and dreams, who are stuck in a perpetual system of nihilism, emptiness and idleness because they are trapped in our system if immigration and direct provision.

A number of weeks ago a man told me he had spent eight years living in a hostel in a room shared with other people waiting for the conclusion of his immigration process. That is eight years on €19 a week, not working, not in education, not participating. The strain on that individual as a result of a life of emptiness was visible. If we look back on this period in some years' time and ask what we did with this group of people, I would say that we forced upon them idleness and mental health problems all because we failed to sort out the immigration process. I have raised the issue several times with the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Shatter. I have met him personally about it and I have raised the issue in the Dáil.

We are continually told that a new Bill is on the way to provide for a single-procedure system to streamline, strengthen and improve our immigration system in order to remove this waste of human potential and human capital. Every time I asked - there years ago, two years ago and last Christmas - I have been told it is six months away. I am starting to question whether the issue really is a priority and something the Minister wants to get done. We have managed to get other much more complicated Bills through and we are still waiting for this Bill. While we do that, we are condemning a generation of people seeking protection in our country to this utter waste of their human potential. We need to get this done. It costs nothing to introduce legislation and would save the State money to have a quicker procedure. Let us do something that will not get us headlines or popular support, but is something that is morally right, and right from the point of view of human rights, the individual and humanity. Let us fix this broken immigration and direct provision system.

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