Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I pay my respects to the more than 300 people who were killed in the bomb attack in Mogadishu on Saturday. The attack was largely ignored in the news outlets here, but it is only right and fitting that we extend our sincere condolences to the families of all those who were killed and injured.

I had intended to refer to the matter of Catalonia, but my colleague, Deputy Gerry Adams, has already done so. We ask the Taoiseach to raise the issue with the Spanish Prime Minister as we all want to see a de-escalation of the crisis. We have seen the arrest of two civic society leaders who have failed to get bail and face prison sentences of 15 years. No one wants to see the crisis deteriorate. We have a different view on how the problem might be solved. The Catalans, as well as many others, have suggested international dialogue and mediation as a way to find a way out of the crisis facing not only the Catalan people but also the Spanish. I ask the Taoiseach to raise the issue at the European Council and suggest the Spanish Government take up the offer of mediation.

One issue on the agenda for the European Council meeting is migration. With others, I have been briefed by Médecins sans Frontières. In the past year it has provided medical care for those who have been detained within a number of official migrant detention centres in Tripoli. It has spoken about the conditions in which migrants are being kept, which are evident in photographs I have seen. We were told about the dire and direct consequences of the European Union's current policy on Libya. Many of the official Libyan centres treat refugees, asylum seekers and migrants as a commodity and keep them in conditions in which one would not be allowed to keep an animal here. There are no sanitation facilities; women are being raped and men are being tortured, yet the European Union is working with the Libyan authorities and the coast guard to hand people back to be kept in these detention centres.

They are run by various militias and run privately by individuals, and the people are kept like a commodity in dark filthy rooms with no ventilation or sanitation. We should be speaking about EU member states, including Ireland, actively enforcing these policies of containment and feeding this business of suffering. I do not think anyone would want to be identified with that, yet we seem to be looking at it, and possibly replicating it in the future. By supporting the capability of the Libyan coast guard Ireland and EU members are building its capacity to return migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean to Libya and not to any safe port or jurisdiction. Will the Taoiseach speak out against this policy? Will he urgently respond to MSF? It has asked to meet the Taoiseach and perhaps he and his officials can consider this.

Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was Malta's best-known investigative journalist, was killed by a bomb placed under her car on Monday. There are concerns about what happened to her and we need to speak about the importance of the safety of investigative journalists. Other states are possibly implicated in this and it is a concern that Ireland should raise at the meeting.

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