Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Last Thursday we discussed legislation introduced by Senator Colette Kelleher on family reunification for refugees. Before we could even start debating it, we were told the Government would not provide a money message for it. I am concerned that the Government would take such an approach. Migration is on the agenda for this week's European Council meeting. The background notes strike a celebratory tone. The main infographic has a caption which boasts that EU support for Libyan coastguards is paying off. It has trained 237 coastguard officers and has rescued 13,185 people up to 30 August, a 190% increase over 2017.

Operation Sophia is a military blockade of the Mediterranean which is forcing people who are fleeing wars, famine and economic conditions to remain trapped in brutal and inhumane conditions in Libya. The root causes of the flight of these people are the economic and foreign policies of the global north. Only two weeks ago in the Dáil the Minister of State at the Department of Defence confirmed that it was a military mission. The root causes will not be addressed by the €2.5 billion in aid funding, the Common Security and Defence Policy missions or by partnering with authorities in already destabilised countries to stop people crossing their borders.

The global north needs to recognise that the aid narrative is based on the falsehood that EU countries become rich because of their own brilliance, hard work and good institutions, and now reach out across the chasm to give generously of its surplus to poor countries, helping them up the development ladder. The anthropologist Jason Hickel has just written a wonderful book, The Divide. I suggest people read it for Christmas. He has written:

This story presupposes a fundamental disjuncture between the wealth of rich nations and the poverty of poor ones, as if the two have nothing at all to do with one another, either historically or today.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In reality, the aid that the North gives to the South is vastly outstripped by financial resources that flow the other direction, in the form of interest on external debt, profit repatriation, illicit financial flows and so on. In fact, for every dollar of aid that the North gives to the South, the South loses up to $24 in net outflows because of how the global economy is structured. The South is a net creditor to the North. Poor countries are effectively developing rich countries, not the other way around.

Hickel's remarks are based on research published in 2017 by the US-based Global Financial Integrity and the centre for applied research at the Norwegian School of Economics. It is the most comprehensive assessment of resource transfers ever undertaken and it puts Ireland at the centre of the crisis in the global south. If we look at all the years since 1980, net outflows add up to a mad total of $16.3 trillion. That is how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. One of the central ways in which this transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been executed is through illicit tax flows through tax havens, of which Ireland is one.

It is not Common Security and Defence Policy missions but stopping the flow of arms into the global south that will address one of the root causes of people fleeing war and instability. In South Sudan, for instance, English, Ukrainian, Israeli and Emirates firms are on record as having sold arms to both sides in the dreadful war there. The annual report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute finds that global arms sales have increased by 2.5% since 2016 and the top 100 arms manufacturers sold $398 billion worth of arms in 2017. Of these sales, 57% were made by US companies while western European companies accounted for 23.8%. This effectively means that 81% of weapons sales by the biggest 100 global companies were based in NATO countries. The West produces the armaments that heighten conflicts from northern Africa to central Asia. America, France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Norway, Switzerland, Finland and Greece have all profited by fuelling the war on the people of Yemen, where up to 14 million are at risk of starvation. The situation in Yemen is horrific and we have stayed silent on it. We do not send peacekeeping missions to Yemen. We send our politicians to shake hands and do business with men who are using famine as a weapon of war.

Neither will the root causes be addressed by sending the Naval Service on a military mission to the Mediterranean to help Libyan militias to capture refugees and bring them back to sites of torture and rape. The stories coming out of the detention centres there are nothing short of shocking. Most of the detained are in Tripoli and the fighting has kicked off again with opposition militias, many of whom are being backed by the UN. They are fighting for control of the north west of the country. Médecins Sans Frontières and its partner SOS Méditerranée have been forced by the Italian state and other European governments to terminate operation by its search and rescue vessel, theAquarius. The EU wants the people who are trying to escape the mayhem we have created for them to rot in detention or drown in the ocean. The EU describes this as a plan that is paying off. We should raise our voice and challenge this because it is terrible.

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