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

My question is about the Taoiseach's discussions in Malta with the EU leaders. I ask him to specifically comment on the deal that the European Union proposes to do with Libya for that country to take refugees. We have gone from doing a deal with Turkey to doing a deal with Libya. It gives the Libyan Government €200 million to hold on to refugees and stop them trying to cross the Mediterranean. I would like to know what the Taoiseach said in this discussion. Some time ago, he spoke in very flowery language about the reality and the record of Irish people dealing with refugees. The Taoiseach said:

It is in our history and personality and in our DNA in Ireland, having dealt with coffin ships after the time of the Famine and the Great Hunger. The humanitarian personality of Ireland is extraordinary.

I do not see anything extraordinarily humanitarian about this deal. In fact, both Amnesty International and Médecins sans Frontières are very critical of this regressive deal with Libya, which will force refugees into absolutely horrific anti-humanitarian circumstances in which they are starved, beaten and raped whether they are men, women or children. The record of the Libyan regime is absolutely appalling.

The Libyan regime is in tatters. There is a civil war taking place there at the moment with three rival governments trying to control a very desperate country. Our own record on taking refugees is not as the Taoiseach described. We have been appallingly miserable to refugees in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. We very recently returned €4 million to the EU that was allocated to us to help resettle migrants. We have 8,000 migrants - men, women and children - living in direct provision, which is a horrendously cruel system that needs to be challenged. I want the Taoiseach to comment on this latest deal. I do not know how to describe how EU leaders could even think of putting refugees into the hands of the Libyan state, given that it is in the middle of a civil war and given the reports coming back from our own Naval Service, which has helped to rescue people from the Mediterranean, of rape, brutality and total inhumanitarian treatment of those refugees in Libya itself. Mr. Donald Trump finds ways of keeping out refugees by building walls. We are keeping them out by sticking them into the hands of an absolutely terrorist regime.

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