Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There has been some amount of nonsense spoken in here this morning. Top billing would have to go to the Tánaiste's efforts to laud the wonderful institution that, in her opinion, the EU is for its democratic principles. It is a bit ironic to the Irish people who had to vote on multiple occasions when we gave the wrong answers in various treaties never mind the irony that we had to listen to the Tánaiste go over her time even though her party received a resounding rejection in the recent general election, and as a result of which I cannot go and show my solidarity with the Luas drivers because the time has run over.

Brexit or no Brexit, one of the key points we need to discuss today is the fact that if the EU continues on the path it has pursued for the past number of years, it will shake itself apart. There can be no other way. As George Monbiot put it last year, everything good about the EU is in retreat while everything bad is on the rampage. I could not have put it any better. The pipe dream of a European Union where together we are better - the yarn that is told to children in school - has been comprehensively destroyed by the actions of the ECB, the European Commission, the European Council, the Council of Ministers, the increased militarisation of the EU and, not least, the flagrant breaches of international asylum laws with the appalling recent deal done with Turkey. Turkey is a country that was recently responsible for 40 people being shot on the Syrian border, a country where ISIS can openly organise and a country that has funded ISIS, supposedly the enemy of the West. The idea on which the EU was originally sold was in part a result of what happened to people who had to move from their countries after the Second World War. Now we are pushing asylum seekers back to Turkey, which cannot in any way be said to be a safe place for them.

Any conversation about Brexit must also be one about the death of the dream of a union of nations working towards social progress and the good of all the people within it because nobody could now say that the EU is anything other than a bureaucratic core to implement neoliberal policies. One only need to look at the fourth railway package, which has caused huge concern for workers in Great Britain. These are controversial proposals that seek to foist the British role of rail privatisation on the rest of Europe. We could have a scenario where privatisation happens anyway despite the reservations of many MEPs and protests from rail workers across the Continent. The enforced liberalisation of the postal services and the EU farm subsidy, which has enriched those at the top, are other issues.

Ireland's tendency to attribute progressive social democratic motivations to the EU is flawed. The main point on which I will concentrate in respect of this myth is the increased militarisation of the EU. It is that militarisation that has sparked the largest challenge facing the EU, namely, what is commonly called the refugee crisis. Talking about Europe having a refugee crisis is the wrong way around because it is refugees who have a Europe crisis. Let us be very clear about that. The refugees that are coming to the shores of Europe in their hundreds of thousands, and they will come again now that the weather has improved, are doing so not for accidental reasons or because they think Europe is great. It is a direct consequence of the interference in their countries by US imperialism, facilitated directly by Great Britain and France and indirectly by countries like Ireland and the other countries of the EU, which has displaced those people like never before. When one is responsible for and complicit in something, one has a responsibility to deal with that. The appropriate response to the humanitarian catastrophe, which is putting it mildly, is a humanitarian one rather than a border control one, which cannot work in any circumstances.

I will deal with the UK's relationship with the EU in the context of its role in respect of refugees. It was a bit sickening to listen to the Taoiseach talk about Irish emigrants when he said, "The British Government is fully aware of our concerns and of the unique status of the Irish community in Great Britain over very many years." He spoke about the best interests of the Irish people living in and moving to the UK. I have no problem with the Irish people who live in the UK or people who want to move around any country, but what are these people but economic migrants? I do not have a problem with that but that is a derogatory term in many people's book. What about the people who are not economic migrants - those who are fleeing for their lives and have left their country, the mothers and fathers who have sold everything they had in their own countries to give money to their children in the hope that those children will make it across Europe to a safe life? It makes me sick that the Taoiseach would get up and talk about Irish people and at the same time, show an utterly callous disregard for unaccompanied minors, poor people, women, men and children who are being driven out of their countries because of actions resulting from our facilitation of the US military through the use of Shannon Airport.

As Deputy Wallace said earlier, we visited Calais and Dunkirk over the weekend to see at first hand the consequences of our interference in the Middle East. That is one horrific scenario. Who are the people in Calais and Dunkirk? They are people who never wanted to come to Europe. They told us that before the war in Syria, they had everything they ever wanted. They told us that they did not want to come to Europe. They included Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds and Syrians. The Syrians we met were made up of computer technicians, telecommunications experts, a doctor, a pharmacist, a chef and a teacher. One of them told his story.

He was a young man named Mahmood who was aged 28 years of age. He was an English teacher who was clearly psychologically destroyed because of what had happened to him. His troubles started when the forces of Assad bombed and occupied their town. His brother was injured and had to go to hospital. They had to go to another town because there was no hospital in that town. The people in the hospital were then worried about spies and that Assad's people would come looking for them because they had to be moved. They moved to another town. The story went on for a very long time but this young man who had been in part a student and a teacher had long avoided military service. He did not want to do it so he was partly on the run. He said, "To be a soldier, a killer, to kill my brothers or be killed, why?" As we sat with these highly educated people in a hut in Calais with rain lashing down, rats outside and basically covered in tarpaulin, all he kept saying was, "Why? Horrible." He spoke about moving to another town that was a playing field for the Al-Nusra Front and the Free Syrian Army. They had to move again. He talked about a 13 kilometre walk made by a group of 40 people in his family - four men and 21 children under the age of nine. They had to carry their granny on a chair over the mountains. That group had to sleep outside in December with no blankets or food. Children as young as three were crying because they had to walk that far. He eventually ended up in Lebanon. He said that they used to go to Lebanon to go to the beach or to go shopping but they are now pariahs there. They need a visa and $1,000 in their pockets and are marshalled into refugee camps, although they are obviously glad to have the security there.

If I had an hour here, the story would take longer. Let us just say that man was ripped off during every part of his journey to end up in that mud-soaked tent in Calais and he was one of the lucky ones because while he described his story as horrendous, it was mild by comparison with a lot of the other stories we heard. Why do these people want to go to Great Britain? Some of them want to go there because they have family there, some of them because they speak English and some of them are naive enough to think that countries in the EU are democratic and that Great Britain is an example of democracy, but that is not true because look at what is happening to Afghans.

The lie is being propagated that there is peace in Afghanistan when everybody knows that the conditions there are much worse than they have ever been. We know from secret papers produced by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that the Afghan Government has pleaded with the UK not to send people back to Afghanistan because those people are vulnerable individuals. Over 2,000 young men, mainly, who were reared in Britain, having come there as unaccompanied minors, went to school and made friends there, have been deported back to Afghanistan, where, as Deputy Wallace said, inevitably they will be killed. We know from talking to people that many lost family members who were taken and killed by the Taliban. One young man we spent time with said his father was executed by the Taliban and his body was dumped outside their house. That young man is on the run across Europe now. We met a young man who lost all of his family in Iran. He has no one in the whole world, nothing in England, but an illusion that he will find safe haven there.

Rather than our telling the British people how to vote or saying we would like them to stay in, we should be telling them to honour their human rights obligations, to stop sending people back to certain death. We should tell the French Government to stop using the CRS and riot police against vulnerable young people, splitting open their heads when nobody is looking. We should tell the mayor of Dunkirk, an admirable, wonderful man who cleaned up the conditions people there were living in that he has done a good job and is an example of a true European. Better, we should not be telling anybody to do anything. We should be doing it ourselves as an independent, neutral country.

Border controls, which the EU proposes, do not stop refugees. The only way to stop refugees is to stop interfering in their countries and facilitate a peace process. We should support the Kurdish fighters who are taking on ISIS on the ground. Border controls only kill people like the hundreds who lost their lives in the Mediterranean this week or enrich smugglers. The going price for a family in the back of a refrigerated truck, where they might end up dead or frozen, to make the short journey from Calais to the UK is £20,000. Is that what we want for teenagers? I do not know about the Minister but I have a teenage child, as I am sure many here do. Do we want teenagers, who have shown the resilience to go half way around the world, to be abandoned or sent back to certain death? What can we do? We can always do something.

I am utterly ashamed of how little we have done and the pretence that we put up about this. We talk about how we mistreated children in this State in the past and we did do that. Now we have a chance to do something for children. I am an atheist but many people here claim to be Christian. The Pope at least went out and took a few families back. Why are we not doing that? Why are we not promoting the idea that, given that Irish people are in every part of the globe, we will take some people in? It is not good enough for the Minister to say he went to Greece and no one wants to come to Ireland. That is not true. We have not positively marketed the fact that we would welcome people here. There is no awareness of Ireland. I would compare our Government’s lack of action with the unbelievable action of Irish citizens: the young woman, Karen, from Rathfarnham, who gave up her job and works with unaccompanied minors out there; Sinéad from Dundalk, a law student who goes out there every couple of weeks to help; Gary, a solicitor in Dublin, who goes out every month; the retired couple from Tyrone who we met, who have taken their caravan over there for six weeks and get stuck in and help. We do nothing. We stand idly by. We should be facilitating, inside the EU, a process where people can apply for asylum in any country they choose from Calais and Dunkirk so that they do not have to risk their lives every night trying to jump onto a truck and maybe get their heads mashed by an axle or be beaten up by the French riot police. We could be pioneering and leading that situation. Why would we not? What would be wrong with that? It would be a wonderful addition to our society, if, instead of telling people in Britain and everywhere else what to do, although we would advise them, we led by example and went to those camps, set up an immigration office and facilitated the unaccompanied minors, those brilliant, wonderful young boys we met over the weekend. If we do not do that, the Minister will be responsible for the most appalling crimes meted out to humanity. Rather than our telling people what to do we should be leading. This is the start of this conversation. If we get a government together in this State this should be our leading priority for the future.

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