Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is somewhat poignant that this discussion is taking place against the backdrop of the appalling terrorist attacks in Belgium, a slaughter of innocents and an experience which, unfortunately, is an almost daily occurrence in the Middle East and is now happening in mainland Europe. While we obviously offer our deepest sympathies to the victims of that atrocity and condemn those actions utterly, we cannot divorce what is going on in terms of the rise of terrorism from the emerging catastrophe and humanitarian refugee crisis.

They are both by-products of imperialist interventions in the Middle East and unless we take these points on board and address our complicity in these matters, we will never get justice and the terror being experienced so horrifically today will continue unabated.

Obviously, the primary purpose of the Council meeting and this debate was and is to deal with the humanitarian crisis involving refugees. Never in the history of the operation of human rights organisations has there been such condemnation of the activities of the European Union. When have the executive director of Human Rights Watch, the secretary general of Amnesty International and the secretary general of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles ever jointly written to the European Union to say nobody should be under any illusion that the very principle of international protection for those fleeing war and persecution is at stake? They have pointed out that governments had a choice. The choice before them was whether they should defend the right to asylum or to horse-trade with a country with an inadequate record in supporting human rights. Unfortunately, the EU establishment and Ireland have an ignominious history of horse-trading on these issues. Since the deal was announced and agreed, every human rights organisation has been in uproar. They have not minced their words, describing what has happened as a dark day for the refugee convention, Europe and humanity. Sometimes, exaggerated statements are made in the House and across the airwaves. However, these sentiments are probably an understatement regarding what is going on.

What has the European Union done? It is stating refugees arriving in Greece exhausted, terrified, cold, wet and desperate will be promptly picked up, put on boats and sent back to Turkey. There is no question whatsoever that the process will be one of illegal mass expulsions from Europe of people who - let us face it - have an absolute right under international law to seek asylum in Europe. Mass collective expulsions are prohibited under the ECHR. That is what this deal facilitates because there is no institutional capacity on the Greek islands to process refugee applications in such a short time. The only thing that will result is mass expulsions which cannot be made legally. We are supposed to believe Europe will accept in exchange 72,000 refugees under a one-to-one resettlement scheme. As it stands, that equates to 2.6% of the 2.7 million Syrians in Turkey, but we all know that nothing like 72,000 will get into Europe, given that by January this year, fewer than 800 had been brought to Europe under a 2015 deal to resettle 22,500 refugees. If the European Union cannot even do that, how will it deal with larger numbers? Ireland has to look at itself in this regard.

When the crisis broke and refugees were drowning in the numbers that they were, there was an outpouring of grief and sympathy from Irish citizens and a demand that we take more than the 4,000 refugees we had agreed to take. The State has not even taken in a fraction of that number and the Government has only planned for approximately 5% of the number. When he replies to questions, the Taoiseach needs to address how he will deal with that issue. Every principle of international law on asylum has been contravened by the deal. How Europe deals with the refugee crisis and those fleeing atrocities in which both it and Ireland are complicit must be addressed. It is a stain on the continent's collective history and we will reap a whirlwind for it, unless it is addressed. We have been horrified by refugees being tear-gassed and beaten in Hungary, Slovenia, Macedonia and France. We stood by and allowed refugees to drown in their thousands. We can look at Council meetings that took place as a perfect example of what Hannah Arendt called "a banality of evil". The Council is bartering humans, which is dehumanising and despicable. It is akin to what happened in the 1930s in attitudes to refugees. I do not make that point lightly, but there are parallels worth noting because following the Anschluss in 1938, the British Government tightened entry requirements for Austrian Jews by introducing strictly controlled visas precisely to restrict their numbers. A total of 65,000 Austrian Jews died in the Holocaust. At the Evian Conference in 1938 all 32 nations attending, including Ireland and the rest of Europe, made sad faces about the plight of the Jews fleeing persecution in Germany but the only country to accept more was the Dominican Republic. In 2016 Europe wants to barter human lives with a country that does not fully recognise refugees and that will almost certainly return as many of them as possible to the countries from which they came because the Union will not accept responsibility for dealing with the humanitarian crisis.

I could go on all day about this, but we need to consider Turkey specially. Its human rights record is bad and getting worse. The country is rapidly deteriorating into an authoritarian, repressive state with severe restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly, a compromised judicial system and a terrifying security crackdown on anyone who dares to speak out. Last week three academics were jailed for signing a petition which talked about security operations against the PKK youth movement. There have been persistent reports of the abuse of refugees, with guards at unofficial border crossings shooting at and beating refugees and pushing them back to the Syrian war zone, the closure of borders arbitrarily and so on. These are facts. Other Deputies have referred to the fact that Turkey has never done away with the geographical limitation which was lifted by most signatories to the Geneva Convention in 1967, whereby refugees from anywhere except the European Union can only claim a limited form of temporary protection that falls far short of the full protection to which they are entitled elsewhere. Turkey cannot be considered to be a safe third country to return refugees. EU law specifically states a third country can only be considered safe if it has ratified the provisions of the Geneva Convention without any geographical limitations, but Turkey has not done so. Refugees do not have the right to work there and there are severe restrictions on numbers which make it almost meaningless. There is no judicial oversight or independent inspection of many of the detention centres where many refugees are held and NGOs are not allowed to monitor what is going on. President Erdoğan recently said "establishing a safe zone [which he is doing in conjunction with the European Union] constitutes the basis of 1.7 million Syrian refugees' return." They are talking about building refugee camps inside Syria and returning refugees to them. As Human Rights Watch stated, this is a little like creating the so-called safe zones that were established in Srebrenica and we all know what happened there.

What happened in Europe this week was described as being "on the edge of the law". That is not the case because it has gone over the edge. There was an excellent article in The Irish Times last Saturday by Thomas Klau in which he described the consequences of this deal. He stated: "If ... Europe ... now leaves millions of grandparents, mothers, fathers, youths and children to fester in hopeless poverty, vegetating in shantytowns and squalor, all this a few hundred or dozens of kilometres away from our borders, then we had better prepare for the price to pay." That is poignant in the context of what has happened today because terrorism and refugees are two sides of the same coin of imperialist intervention and until we shape up to our responsibility in that regard, we, too, will be complicit in that action. As a neutral country, Ireland should positively stand against this. I am ashamed to say the Taoiseach did not, even if he had to stand alone in Europe. He should have done so to be true to the history of his country.

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