Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In Ireland we are in a unique position, in between Brexit and Trump, to give a different view to the world of the nature of discrimination and of our own experience because of our own history. We are the people of Famine ships, who have gone to every corner of world. We understand the immigrant experience like no other. That is why it is deeply disappointing when people in this House use racism, fear and language to punch down. Racism is about power. It is sometimes about trying to isolate a group that one feels is not powerful, because one can, and therefore to give power to oneself.

We have Deputies in this House who have said that asylum seekers are freeloaders, blackguards and hoodlums, that asylum seekers need to be deprogrammed and that asylum seekers are here to sponge off the system. We have two members of a governing party who have been on the wrong side of anti-Traveller literature controversies, one of whom sits at Cabinet. A number of years ago a Fine Gael councillor said in a public statement that he would not deal with black Africans. He lost the Whip for 18 months. We need to call out the hypocrisy of standing in a Parliament like this full of white people and saying that racism is something other people do because it is what politicians in Ireland do. The reaction to racism among public representatives is often that he or she was not speaking for the party, and then we move on.

There is a sense that statements, such as anti-Traveller rhetoric, are not racism but are instead something different. I first ran for election in the local elections in 2004, which coincided with the 2004 citizenship referendum proposed by Fianna Fáil and supported by Fine Gael. It was a deliberate attempt, in my mind, to punch down at or amplify a suspicion that one cannot trust an asylum seeker because there were suggestions that heavily pregnant asylum seekers were in Ireland purely to get citizenship for their children. Can one imagine holding a constitutional referendum on that matter on the same day as a local election? One can only imagine the type of poison that unleased.

Let us please not stand in this auditorium, Parliament and Assembly and say that racism is what other people in Irish society do and that we have no part in it because we do. I do not think people and political parties in this Parliament should be going to fundraisers in America and taking money from racist Trump supporters. I do not think that is good enough. We have to call out Irish America on its support for the current President of the United States. We have to call out Irish communities in Britain who are anti-immigrant, something which is so hypocritical that it is astounding. If we do not take that stand, who will? How can we go to the United States on St. Patrick's Day, hand over bowls of shamrock and advocate for the undocumented Irish in America, and not do the very same for the 26,000 undocumented workers here? They are vulnerable, poorly paid and are in vulnerable work.

Daniel O'Connell once said about the Irish slave owner, "How can the generous, the charitable, the humane, and the noble emotions of the Irish heart have become extinct amongst you?" It is important, then, for the current generation of Irish leaders to speak to the hearts and experience of Irish-American, Anglo-Irish or Irish-Australian politicians all over the world who engage in racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment about the history of the coffin ships, discrimination, being on the lowest run and being punched down.

What can we do? I mentioned that we need to work on the regularisation of undocumented migrants. We need to pass the Traveller Culture and History in Education Bill 2018, not just for Traveller children but for all Irish children. We need to legislate for citizenship for children born here. We do not need another referendum to overturn what happened in 2004.

The 2004 amendment enabled this Assembly to pass whatever legislation it wished to. We need to change that. We need to ensure we have citizenship rights for every child who is born here. We need to extend the right to work for asylum seekers by removing the erroneous barriers that exist to their working here. We need to legislate against hate speech. The Minister spoke about the 1989 Act, which has been proven to be effectively useless. Many agencies and groups have unsuccessfully tried over a number of years to get better and more robust hate-speech and hate-crime legislation. Now is the time to do it.

I have spoken previously about the importance of having the Dáil, the Seanad, the teaching profession, the Garda and other public service professions reflect the population they serve. It is not good enough to say it is an aspiration. It is important for us to actually do something about it. For an Irish Nigerian child, an Irish Polish child or an Irish Traveller child, how powerful would it be to have somebody in their classroom teaching them who looks just like them? For people who are white and particularly who are male, the world is run by people who look just like them and the television is full of people who look just like them. For those who are not it can be a very cold place and it can feel as if they do not fit in. We have had a bad history of this with people with particular accents, people from particular addresses and obviously people from the Traveller community.

Now is the opportunity to make our public broadcaster, the teaching profession, the Garda and this Assembly more reflective of the population. With 11 appointments due to be made to the Seanad in a number of weeks, there is no reason not to put the fine words of the Minister's speech into action and actually appoint to the Seanad - to these Houses of the Oireachtas - somebody from these minority communities, rather than a party political hack, which is inevitably what will happen. How powerful would it be to have somebody from the black community or the Traveller community in Ireland sitting in the Seanad because the Taoiseach has made it a priority? Alternatively, will we just go back to the way we were? Running for election and getting elected is important and if punching down on asylum seekers, immigrants or Travellers is what gets someone elected, that is just the way the system works.

As has been said, all of us have our prejudices. Anybody who stands up here and says they do not have prejudices is telling lies because we all have. We all grew up in this country and we all know about the sectarianism, the anti-Traveller sentiment and the prejudices that are all around us. We all feel them, and we often let ourselves down by using them. Certainly, the political system could do much more than just the words that are spoken here today.

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