Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Along with other parliamentarians, including Deputy Derek Keating, I went to Jordan in 2013. We went down to the Syria-Jordan border and we visited the refugee camps there. There was something rather striking about the whole thing. There are three different refugee camps in Jordan. The camp in Amman is where the 1948 Palestinian refugees were put up. Further south there is another Palestinian refugee camp dating from 1967. Then there is the Syrian-Palestinian refugee camp on the Syria-Jordan border. One thing that struck me was that the conditions in the refugee camp there, as bad as they were, were far better than those in the camps dating from 1948 and 1967. This has been allowed to continue in relative silence and without anything being done, either by Europe or anyone in the so-called developed world.

Last year, I went to Turkey. I went on my own. What struck me most about Turkey was the fact that there are 800,000 Syrian refugees in Istanbul alone. That was the figure I was given. I travelled for 17 hours down to the Syrian border where there are more than 1 million people in camps at the moment. These camps are certainly being used to some extent as a source of recruitment by ISIS and other anti-Assad forces in Syria. Worse, they are being supported and financed by people who have another agenda. Obviously, American hardware is being supplied to them. Some weeks back, while Americans were bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Turkey decided to start bombing the Kurds because they were fighting ISIS, having been supported by the Americans to do so initially. What is being allowed to happen is absolutely and totally disgraceful. I suggest we should use whatever influence we have within the EU to try to promote and push an agenda to demilitarise the entire area. We cannot have a situation whereby we have weapons being supplied by America and its allies to Kurdish fighters to fight ISIS while Turkey, a friend of America, is bombing the same people. What is happening is absolutely disgraceful. Growing numbers of refugees are coming from Syria and Iraq.

Let us not forget that the invasion of Iraq set the whole place alight. We need to remember that. At the time, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to oppose it. The Labour Party vehemently opposed it at the time and I imagine members of the Labour Party were among the marchers. We now have a situation whereby the Government is silent despite what is happening with Shannon Airport being used for rendition fights and so forth. The Government silence is deafening. From a humanitarian perspective, I trust the Minister of State will use his influence to try to ensure the demilitarisation of the area by the superpowers, as they call themselves. They are only using the Syrian people and refugees throughout the region as cannon fodder.

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