Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Government should be utterly ashamed of itself for the Bill and for bringing it to the Dáil on international human rights day. The Labour Party should be especially ashamed of itself, as its members parade around as champions of equality, but they will support a Bill which is regressive, cruel and draconian with regard to some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

It is deeply ironic that a Bill such as this could be put forward when we have a disaster in Syria which has forced half the country's population to flee in desperate circumstances. They have been herded into camps surrounded by barbed wire in Greece and elsewhere, they have drowned in the Mediterranean and they are desperately in need of assistance and refuge. What we should have is a Bill which offers a compassionate, generous and independent system of asylum which does away with the utter scandal of direct provision and gives rights to asylum seekers, particularly to their children, prioritises them, gives them the support they need and gives them the right to work and participate in society. All these things which should be in the Bill, especially at this time, are not in the Bill. Instead what we have is a Bill which is about fast-tracking cruel deportations, making them easier to carry out, with none of the safeguards necessary to vindicate the rights of some of the most desperate and vulnerable people in the world. It is utterly shameful.

Mohamed Ali Sleyum was mentioned earlier. He is an example of what needed to be addressed in the Bill. He was a Tanzanian man who was deported from this country in April 2014, and within hours of going back to Tanzania he was beaten and a few hours later he was dead, because we got it wrong. We deported somebody who should not have been deported. Now we have a Bill which makes the kind of tragic mistake more and not less likely. The Bill removes the right to a proper appeals process and the necessary supports, essentially refuses to recognise the reality of people arriving here, and instead facilitates a fast-track deportation process and more dawn raids by gardaí bursting into people's houses without warrants from a court to pack them off on planes and, potentially in many cases, put them back to the horror they tried to escape in the first place.

It is shameful and it is a damning indictment that the Irish Refugee Council, Nasc, Doras Luimní, the Children's Rights Alliance and Anti-Deportation Ireland, and the list goes on, have either opposed and condemned the Bill outright or have said it is way short of what it should be and needs to be very substantially amended. Instead this is what we get.

All of the key issues of injustice in the scandal of direct provision that were identified by the Joint Committee on Public Service Oversight and Petitions, of which I am a member, and by working groups were all ignored and instead what we have is a process to fast-track deportation and deny proper justice to people.

I underline the point that all this is made even more shameful when the Government is again complicit in creating the conditions which lead to desperate people fleeing their countries by facilitating the US war machine at Shannon Airport, which has resulted in the barbaric wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now another war in Syria. These have created the conditions that gave rise to organisations such as Daesh and have produced this unprecedented refugee crisis. We either create the conditions for people to be forced to flee their homes or we do nothing, at least, to speak up against the actions that lead to the crises in the first place, and then we have a cruel fortress which denies people the right to asylum and human dignity and the protection of their rights and the rights of their children and their families. The Government should be ashamed.

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