Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

-----by European boats in Operation Sophia in which the Irish Defence Forces participate, on a day in which migrants are shot with rubber bullets as they try to climb barbed wire in Europe, have we lost our minds? Everybody with half a heart or a shred of humanity would support the motion before the House today and I am as happy as anybody else to condemn the hideousness of the American Government's policy of separating migrant children from their parents, very deliberately, with maximum cruelty.

We condemn absolutely the US policy of locking migrants up in changes but let us not take our eye off the ball. Migrants are being locked up in cages in Europe too. A joint report by the International Rescue Committee, the Norwegian Refugee Council and Oxfam last year talked about refugees landing in Greece and being kept in cages behind barbed wire. Conditions in European detention centres are so bad that refugees have sewn up their lips, gone on hunger strike and set themselves on fire to protest the inhumanity of their conditions.

Let us discuss actions we will be involved in. Next week, on 28 and 29 June, the EU is to debate proposals to expand the network of detention centres in Libya and to expand the arbitrary detention of vulnerable people in warehouses run by militias where torture is rife, all of which is paid for by the EU. We have some neck to condemn the behaviour of the US in that context when we have been so culpable ourselves. Deputy Wallace is right that it is a bit sickening to listen to elements of the media and the political establishment who have been silent on the role of the US military in making people refugees in the first place but who are now ochoning their treatment when they end up on US shores. It is disgraceful and sickening. We do not have the time to deal with the conditions in some of the camps of Europe but they are there. We have no standing to criticise the United States. We are just as bad. One could say that we are worse in some ways because we have the hypocrisy and pretence of thinking that Europe is somehow different.

Deputy Wallace is right to highlight that today is the sixth anniversary of the arbitrary detention of Julian Assange. I hand it to Europe here that the United States is in a league of its own when it comes to prosecuting people who threaten to get in the way of that country's pursuit of endless and profitable war. Julian Assange has been in the Ecuadorian embassy for six years, denied any form of serious human contact, with no Internet, no outdoor air, no phone calls and no visits, except from his lawyers, once a month for the past three months. He faces prosecution under the Espionage Act and could potentially spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement in a US prison. His crime is being a journalist who has upset the United States. As Human Rights Watch points out, any extradition or prosecution of Assange under the Act will open the door for similar prosecutions of other publications and journalists in the US who dare to upset that country's Government. Assange has agreed to surrender himself to British police only if he is guaranteed against extradition, which the UK will not give.

We should be leading the charge on this with regard to arbitrary detention, solitary confinement and appalling treatment of refugees on World Refugee Day. We have plenty to do. If we are serious about taking on the US with regard to how it deals with migrants, let us do it by ending, once and for all, its use of Shannon, which has contributed so shamefully to the deaths and permanent separation of so many children from their families across the world.

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