Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have an opportunity to speak on this issue. When the controversy in Oughterard arose I happened to be on the other side of the Atlantic. I was actually on a small tour that brought me to many places where we met the sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of people who had emigrated to America and who have done well since in their communities but who were not always welcome.

We must start at the beginning in this debate and see what we agree on. I take it that everyone agrees we should honour our international obligations and the laws we have adopted, which include the European laws on this matter. Once one agrees to go down the way of law, one must stick to the law. Everyone who claims asylum has the right to due process and it is not fair or right to prejudge anyone's individual case. There are a lot of processes involved when it comes to asylum: subsidiary protection, humanitarian leave to remain, the international tribunal and so on. In addition, someone who is dissatisfied with all the decisions made all the way down the line can go to the courts for judicial review. I welcome some steps that have been taken to speed up this process, and the Minister's predecessor joined it into one process, but we must also recognise that the asylum seeker, or the person who comes here looking to stay here, has the right to use all the processes, including the courts, and that no matter how much one telescopes that, it can take some time. It is important that at all levels of the process we provide adequate resources, including in the courts. We need to be able to ensure there are no delays, including in the courts, that are created by the State. In that way we will give everyone decisions as speedily as possible.

Another argument has characterised this debate.

It would be fair to say that many communities say that direct provision is not a solution. People involved in anti-racism networks and so on say direct provision is not the right answer. We must respond to the way the world is and not the way it should be.

Two groups of people keep coming into my office on Mondays. There is no conflict between the groups. One group is comprised of local, indigenous people who have been in the area forever and are on the housing lists but cannot get houses and are winding up in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. The other group is asylum seekers who are looking for starts in this country. We all get on famously well. The reality is that we are now trying to deal with this crisis in the context where there are not enough houses no matter how things are re-jigged. It is hard to see how we are going to accommodate the number of people looking for housing. The issue of displacement and who gets displaced is one we must confront. It is one for which I do not have a Solomon answer but I will come to it again. The hardest part of my week, every week, is listening to people on all of the housing issues.

There are also a large number of people in direct provision who have legal leave to remain. That raises two issues I would like to touch on tonight. The first is why we are unable to house those people. The second is an issue I intend to pursue the full way. At least two people have come into my office with stamp 4 permission to remain. They have gone to the local authority in Galway city and been refused, under some housing circular, permission to go on the housing list, or even to go on the housing list for HAP. I have read the circular and it is well written in the sense of being totally ambiguous. My reading of it is that these people are entitled to be on the housing list. We are now taking this case to the Ombudsman and will take it further, if necessary. We need clarification on whether one is entitled to go on the local authority housing list when one has a stamp 4 visa. Can the Minister of State come back to me after this debate and tell me "Yes" or "No" on that question? Galway City Council is telling me that one has to wait four years to go on the housing list.

We have set up wondrous systems in this country and I do not mean that in a complimentary way because those systems often create terrible problems. A system of bidding is going on. The Minister of State will say that, for commercially sensitive reasons, he cannot tell anybody what everybody knows, namely, that the Department received a tender for a hotel or guest house to take asylum seekers. The information has quite obviously got around the relevant town way ahead of the Minister of State making an announcement and when everybody in a town knows, the Minister of State officially does not know yet. Such a system is broken and we must think of another system that does not upset procurement laws but deals with this issue.

The other things we have not done well are communications and community consultation. Community services in health, education and transport could actually be a boon to the greater community if they were handled correctly. For example, there are plenty of places in my constituency where there is no transport for locals, let alone for asylum seekers, to the largest towns and cities.

I read the Minister's speech carefully and noticed that a consultative group has been set up to be chaired by Catherine Day. One of the things I worry about are consultative groups made of those who are, in day-to-day life, quite insulated from the problem, do not live in the areas where this is likely to be a matter of contention and are not competing, on the ground, for scarce resources. That exacerbates this problem.

When I came home from the United States of America, just before the problem in Oughterard was resolved, I proposed that a forum would be set up for four months to come up with an agreed report to look at alternatives to direct provision. It would also focus on community relations and better consultation. I suggested that forum would have a chair appointed by the Minister of State, or we would accept the present chair. It would have representatives from the Department, the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service, INIS, the Reception and Integration Agency, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, the Immigrant Council of Ireland, the anti-racism networks and representatives of the CEOs of the various counties because housing, and public housing, is a big issue here. The forum would also have representative local authority members to be selected by local authority members groups and representatives from the community sector to be selected from those registered with the various local authorities around the country. This would not be a huge group and would be set up to look for written submissions and, where appropriate, would bring people in in a concentrated effort to make oral submissions. People from non-governmental organisations, NGOs, local authorities and the State would be around a table, rather than it being decided only on the State side. They would then be tasked with facing up to the realities and making recommendations on the actual realities of the world, not some ideal world where things are not as they are.

That forum would be given four months. At that stage, I was suggesting it would be completed by the end of January because this was two months ago. I made this proposal available to the Minister of State and to my party leader. Setting up a group that does not represent all the diverse approaches to this issue that are out there from responsible groups will not get the buy-in that we need to get a national conversation and buy-in for a solution. Something that is led and controlled by officialdom will not get that buy-in. I put my proposal back on the table this evening. We can give out all we want in this Chamber about the way the world is but the problem is to come up with workable proposals that might actually get buy-in from the vast majority of the well-meaning people of this country.

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