Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I want to know a bit more about the conversation on migration. The issue of Brexit and our concerns are extremely important to us but there is a bigger picture going on in Europe and around the world at present, as Deputy Haughey alluded to. This is the very dangerous rise of the far right, xenophobia and racism that finds its scapegoat in desperate migrants seeking to flee awful situations in the Middle East, north Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. I want to know that the Taoiseach is out there batting against this filthy xenophobic racism and arguing against the Kurzs and Orbáns of this world in trying to scapegoat immigrants, thousands of whom are dying in the Mediterranean. Recently the Moroccan authorities were shooting at them, there are horrendous stories of human rights abuses in Libya and thousands of men, women and children are dying in the Mediterranean because of this filthy xenophobic racism. We need absolutely to take up the cudgels against it and state that immigrants are good. They are not a burden and they enhance the societies to which they come, as did Irish migrants from this country everywhere they went. It is important that the Taoiseach is publicly seen to articulate this message. Is that what the Taoiseach is doing? How are we engaging in this debate on migration given the very dangerous subtext? In fact, it is not even a subtext, it is an explicit fanning of the flames of racism in a worrying echo of the 1930s.

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