Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

When I read through this and all it implies, I realise that if I was running a right-wing State that wanted to batten down the hatches, control workers' rights and stop refugees from receiving the support and shelter they deserve, I would probably be in favour of CEPOL training my police force because it would be watching all of the left-wing and radical people who want to change society and send it in a different direction. In particular, my police force would be trained to support fortress Europe and Frontex, which is a European-wide police force with 1,500 police operatives whose only objective is to stop refugees getting across Europe.

We have spoken about this previously in the House. I was in Greece earlier this year and visited many of the refugee camps and the borders where these police forces operate. It is quite sickening to see a group of human beings holding back another desperate group of human beings. There are terrified, traumatised and hungry children who are desperate for safety and security with their families trying to get to the wealthiest part of the planet. The EU is the wealthiest part of the planet, yet we intend participating in Frontex, which does not deal with mass migration but is about resisting a refugee crisis and containing people in the most desperate parts of the world, including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali and beyond. On the grounds that CEPOL would train our police force to contain refugees, I appeal to people in this House to have a bit of humanity and not participate in the sort of Robocop scenes I witnessed in Greece, which involved the police literally holding back desperate populations from receiving the sort of the sanctity and security they deserve under countless international agreements to which we have signed up through the UN and the Geneva Convention. They are all being broken by participation in this police force.

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