Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his contribution. We all agree, accept and understand that racism exists in every society. It may take different forms but that makes it no less real. Sadly, Ireland is by no means immune to the scourge of racism.

I had a very good engagement yesterday, as the Deputy mentioned, with Irish people who are black and of colour. That Zoom call went on for over an hour as a forum to hear from them and share our collective experience of racism in Ireland. There were ideas aired that could be pursued and one certainly concerns education and ensuring we educate children better in schools and throughout the educational cycle about what is racism, how to identify it and how to deal with it. An interesting point from the conversation was that much of the education now around racism tells people what not to say and how a word or name should not be used, but many people feel this to be disabling. They do not know what they should say. How do we talk about the elephant in the room, which may be race? That is part of what we must do.

We need a reform of our incitement to hatred laws. That work was started by the outgoing Government. I hope it will be completed by the next one to modernise our hate speech and hate crime laws.

Work under way that needs to be completed by the next Government is the creation of an online safety commissioner and a proper infrastructure, legally underpinned, to require social media platforms to take down material that is racist, offensive or incites violence or hatred in any way.

One point I strongly agree with the Deputy on is the need to set a target to have a number of people from ethnic minorities in areas of the public service. We have a health service that is very diverse, although less so as one goes up towards the senior positions, not so much in the Garda, the Defence Forces, the education sector, as the Deputy mentioned, and not at all in the Civil Service, which is very white, including the Department of Justice and Equality, for example. That needs to change. We need to have a target for people who come from ethnic minority backgrounds but also dedicated recruitment campaigns to encourage people because we need to ensure that a generation of young people of colour growing up in Ireland see black and brown school principals, judges and perhaps Cinn Comhairle in the future. Who knows? Visibility and opportunity is very important.

On direct provision, as I said in the House previously, I agree that much of the accommodation is substandard and that needs to change. It would not be honest to say that we can immediately end it. We need to be honest about that. It has been in place for 20 years, nine years under my party and, let us not forget, four years under the Green Party. If we could provide own-door, self-catering accommodation to 7,000 people tomorrow we probably would but we cannot do that. Also, we do not know how many will come into the country this year, next year and other years but I do believe we should try to phase it out.

On income inequality, I agree it can drive racism. We are one of the few countries in recent years that has actually reduced income inequality. We should be proud of having achieved that as a country. Poverty has fallen every year for the past five years, as has deprivation. That needs to continue and as we have demonstrated in the past five years, the best way to reduce poverty and income inequality is job creation and opportunity. That is what needs to be reinforced. We must ensure that we do not go backwards in terms of our commitment to job creation and providing people with opportunities to advance themselves.

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