Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Like others, I am glad to have an opportunity to speak in this very important debate at this crucial time. Like many in this House, I have been dealing with immigrants for at least 20 years now. We came through the original phases of direct provision accommodation which, unfortunately, were not even up to the standards we have now; they were worse and there was much more serious overcrowding.

We have an obligation to deal with the situation that is presented to us in the way we would like to have our situation dealt with if we were in their position. We should remind ourselves of that at every single opportunity. There is not a household in this country that has not had relatives of one generation or another overseas in various countries across the globe. If there is one nationality that should be in a position to assess the situation better than all others, it has to be the Irish, who have been everywhere. All of our relatives, including both my parents, were emigrants and had little going for them. They left this country as economic emigrants, I might add. There is a lot of criticism of economic immigrants nowadays. What do we expect people to do?

Do we want them to starve where they are or do we expect them to seek out something better? We need to remember that we have a social, political and humanitarian obligation to do the best we can, to address their issues and to see if we can make them welcome, in accordance with the céad míle fáilte for which we are so famous.

From time to time people will say "I am not a racist - but". I am a little tired of hearing that phrase. I am glad to say, however, that when one explains matters to the people who have such views they seem to take on board and understand that there are people in less fortunate positions than theirs and that there but for the grace of God go the rest of us.

One of the most difficult situations I ever had to deal with concerned victims of the war in Somalia, young women and men of all ages, from kids to teenagers, who were violently abused and mistreated in the course of that war. How did the war start? A smart guy got hold of a radio station, a communications centre, and poured out hatred for about a year and a half until he ignited a fuse and the war started. Some 500,000 people, many of them women, were massacred in the aftermath. That is a lesson to us.

If we need more lessons, let us go back in our European history to the first half of the 20th century and remember what happened during that period. Fear was generated - that was the first thing: fear of the unknown, fear of what might happen and fear of others. It turned out in the final analysis that 70 million people were put to death in order to prove or disprove a point. This was an appalling reflection on humanity and proved again and again, if it needed to be proven, that man's inhumanity to man knows no bounds and still continues.

I am not condemning anybody. I say to those who have different views that they should not have those views. People will say that some people speak out but that they have to say what everyone else thinks. This is not true. If they are saying what others are thinking, those thinking along those lines should not be doing so. They should read their history. What an appalling history.

I think back to some of these cases. I remember the cases of those who were subject to electric shock treatment and whose veins on their arms and legs had protruded in a grotesque way because of that treatment. Young women who had been brutalised and raped and left on the streets came to us in this country when our system was not so well prepared. Some of them departed again because the process was too long and too tedious and they could not wait. Some of them ended up on the streets of London and starved. Some of them ended up back in the countries whence they came and got AIDS and died.

If we were ever to assess our response and what it should be in such a situation, all we would have to do is look at ourselves and ask ourselves how we would like to be treated if we were to come into a strange land and were starving and had no friends. Would we be treated with suspicion? If so, how would we deal with that? In the years I have spent in this House I have visited many of our immigrants, as I am sure everyone else here has done. I have witnessed poignant situations, heart-rending in some cases.

I will refer incidentally to one thing I was glad to be able to do something about. When the various people were being assessed by the tribunal for admission I discovered that for some unknown reason one person came up again and again as never receiving favourable consideration. I tabled a Dáil question about the matter and discovered in the reply that one person was responsible for assessing 1,500 people, not one of whom merited favourable consideration. I asked myself how that could be. Fortunately, that person was relieved of that post, and that is as it should be.

The point I wish to emphasise is that we are where we are and we have come through difficult times. We came through the economic crisis just gone and many difficult times in previous economic crises, and I have no doubt but that we will have economic crises in the future. We should think again about whether or not we have always responded in the way we should have done. Direct provision is not ideal. It is a means of holding the situation for the moment. It cannot be otherwise because we have only come through a serious recession ourselves. Direct provision is not what it should be, but I would still like it to be in accordance with the best the Irish could offer at any given time. I had occasion not so long ago to meet a group of European parliamentarians who were ill-disposed towards refugees and immigrants and not in any way empathetic even to the children washed up on the shores, the dead babies. I had to remind them that I remembered the time when they themselves were refugees, which was not so long ago. It is no harm at all for civilisation to remind itself, all of us, collectively and individually, that such times can visit anyone. Unknowingly, we can find ourselves in such situations over which we have no control.

I thank the Acting Chairman for giving me the opportunity to say these few words by switching positions. I hope we treat the people who arrive on our shores sympathetically and in a humanitarian way. Whenever they go back to where they came from, whether or not they wish to go, I would like to think they would say they were treated well by Irish people and that if they had to go back again, they would go without fear.

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