Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister of State will be aware, Deputy Clare Daly and I have been raising the issue of the Calais camp for several months now and have been pleading with the Government to do something proactive. Sadly, only last week I was told in this Chamber that the Government could do nothing about it because it is an unofficial camp, which I found to be an horrific response. In general, the Government's response to the refugee crisis in Europe has been nothing short of disgraceful from the start. The Government should be ashamed of how it has dealt with it. The total lack of political will to actually help has been horrific.

The French are dispersing these people to centres around France but have already said that they do not have the necessary facilities to deal with half the children, the unaccompanied minors, that are involved. There are over 1,000 such children in the camp at Calais. The last time the camp was cleared 129 unaccompanied minors disappeared. I will not even speculate about where they ended up. If, this week and next week, the children are taken to reception centres in places like Paris, statistics show that at least 40% will leave and end up on the streets. They will leave the reception centres. These children are not safe. The British have agreed to do something, at last. They are talking about bringing in a certain number of them. They have said that they will concentrate on those under 12 but it just so happens that there are not many children under 12 in the camp. There are lots of children aged between 12 and 18. Indeed, most of them are in that age group so I remain to be convinced as to just how positive a role the British Government intends playing in this.

Our Government is behaving as if this has nothing to do with us and is none of our business. Even if we had never allowed any military operators to use Shannon Airport, we must still feel some sense of responsibility if people are in trouble. Calais is only across the water from us. We say that we care but there is no proof that we do. We have not shown any proof that we care. We said that we were going to bring 4,000 refugees here by the end of 2017 but the chances of us reaching that figure are nil at this stage, given that we are still only at about the 500 mark.

The European Union has talked about dealing with migration and the problems involved. However, it has no interest in the root causes. We have the US giving munitions to Saudi Arabia every day at the moment to bomb the living daylights out of Yemen. Over 10,000 civilians have been killed in Yemen but we have not heard a word about it in here. What is wrong with us? The people who have survived the attacks in Yemen will become refugees. There will be hundreds of thousands of them because Yemen has a big population. There are over 20 million people in Yemen and hundreds of thousands of them will become refugees because they will have no other choice. They will be driven out of their own country because they are being bombed out of it. In the same way, the Americans bombed the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and along with 14 other countries, they are bombing the people out of Syria. It is just total madness and we do not say enough about it. We are not neutral. We facilitate it by letting the US use Shannon Airport as a military base. Where is the rationale behind it? I would like to hear someone rationalise it for me and give me a good explanation as to why we allow Shannon Airport to be used by the US military's war machine.

There is just no end to this. It has been getting worse and worse since 2001. The whole region has been destroyed. The EU, in its infinite wisdom, tried to do a deal with Afghanistan a few weeks ago. The EU is going to send people back to Afghanistan. It just so happens that the majority of the people in the Calais camp are from Afghanistan. Deputy Clare Daly and I spent two long days talking to them there. We also spent a day in the camp at Dunkirk, which is mostly populated by Kurds. The Afghanis told us that they will do anything other than go back. They would rather die in Europe than go back to Afghanistan. Most of them have fallen out with either the Taliban, ISIS, or some other elements of al-Qaeda. Others have family members who worked with the US in Afghanistan.

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They are afraid to go back because their lives are in danger but the EU is talking about doing a deal with Afghanistan to send them back.

We are now talking to the Africans. At a Brussels conference recently they were talking about sending people back to Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal and Ethiopia. Leaked documents show that among the other countries been considered are Sudan and Eritrea. Imagine doing a deal with Sudan to stop people coming out of the country into Europe. The dictator of Sudan, Omar al Bashir, is wanted for war crimes and now the EU is considering hiring him to stop migration at source from the Horn of Africa. Last month Amnesty International released a report with evidence that earlier this year Bashir's airforce was dropping chemical weapons on some of the remote villages yet the EU is interested in doing business with this person in order to stop migrants coming to Europe.

The many people who are still drowning in the Mediterranean are not coming because everything was grand where they were but they would like it better in Europe. They are being forced from their homelands and the West has played a huge part in that. We bear a huge responsibility for what is going on. The race for control of African minerals by Western powers is linked to the fact that so many migrants are trying to get out of the continent of Africa. Huge numbers are coming across the Mediterranean from the Middle Eastern region too. Look at the number of Palestinian refugees in the world today. We still entertain the Israelis as if there is nothing wrong with their relationship with the Palestinians, or with the fact that they are engaging in genocide. They are trying to obliterate the Palestinian people and our Government is okay with that. Will we continue to trade with Saudi Arabia? There are people in here who say we should have nothing to do with the Russians and I would not defend them for one second, what they are doing in Syria is deplorable but so is what the Americans, the French and the British are doing. The Saudis today are arming Al-Nusra which has become a more powerful force than ISIS. We reap what we sow. There are munitions going through Shannon to Saudi Arabia that are being used to kill innocent people in the Yemen and arms going through to Al-Nusra who are every bit as mad as the ISIS crowd yet we are still comfortable working with them. When will we regain our neutrality? I firmly believe that the majority of Irish people would like Ireland to be neutral.

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