Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to be able to speak today on what looks like an end to direct provision. I am from Meelick in County Clare, where we have received refugees since 1957. First, we had refugees coming in from the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. On a sporadic basis, over the decades, we had various cohorts coming to Ireland and to our village for safe refuge. Despite what we saw at various community halls around the country two years ago, with outrageous protests and slogans daubed across the walls of these halls, it has been an enriching experience to have refugees stay in the community for many years.

The model of direct provision does not work, but having refugees come to our community has been a very enriching experience. I want to put on the Dáil record the name of one of them. When I was a teacher in the local school, Ms Anna Mundu joined my class at the age of eight from the Democratic Republic of Congo. She did not have a word of English. She has thrived in the Irish system, going right through primary and secondary schools. Today, she is a front-line health professional and holds an Irish passport. She is a person I really admire and look up to. To this day, we still have a friendship. Indeed, I will speak to her this week.

In my experience, Anna is an example of someone who has gone through the direct provision system and has come out as a fully-fledged, wonderful Irish citizen. While not perfect, the system has enabled her to come from a war-torn country to safe refuge in Ireland and come out the other end. The system has not worked perfectly to date and has many shortcomings. I am glad there is a White Paper in place to end all of this by 2024.

On 1 June 2020 in my home village of Meelick, a sign went up at the crossroads, which stated: "Black Lives Matter". It was put up in solidarity with George Floyd and the larger Black Lives Matter movement in the US. The sign also had a tagline, which read: "End Direct Provision". For the people who have come to Meelick and the Knockalisheen centre, it has been a long-running campaign to end direct provision and to live a more normal life like the rest of us.

I wish to make a few points, specifically on how the system will work between now and its conclusion in 2024. First, there is no footpath around the Knockalisheen centre, so the people who leave the centre have to walk on one of the busiest roads in the area. It is a road that the Government is going to spend millions of euro on in order to make it a northern distributor road, but there will be no pedestrian connectivity. Therefore, the residents are physically cut off from the community, the school, the local GAA pitch and all of the amenities that some of the kids use. I have approached the council and the Minister for Justice and I have gone from Department to Department raising this issue. I hope the Minister's officials make a note of it. There does not seem to be a funding stream for it. It makes no sense for the residents to be physically cut off from the community. For the next three years, until the facility is wound down, they will continue to walk and traipse the roads, putting themselves at risk. I ask that an official from the Minister's Department communicates with me on the issue. I would be happy to give them more information.

The centre is run by a catering company. A catering company is perfectly equipped to run a cafeteria in a college, at a train station or in an airport. However, in my view, such a company is not equipped to run a direct provision centre and deal with all the sensitivities, complexities and the many social issues people bring with them from their home countries, where they have left war and famine and have witnessed horrendous events.

I would also like to highlight the fact that people in direct provision centres are totally disenfranchised. This has not often been spoken about over the last year or two, as this debate has gained more and more volume. When I was a councillor, up to 14 months ago, I was often asked to go to the direct provision centre and meet with people who I was helping through the legal process to remain in Ireland. On each occasion, I was denied entry.

The people living there are totally and utterly disenfranchised. I was once smuggled into the building by some residents and got to see the small cubicle curtains separating parents from children. It was like a hospital environment, where you pull around the little curtain at night-time. I was their representative and they were entitled, under the Irish voting system, to vote for me in local elections. Some of them did vote for me. I, in turn, had every constitutional right to represent them, but I was not allowed beyond the security barrier. That is fundamentally wrong and it should be changed between now and the wind-down of direct provision in three years' time.

Two or three years ago, I went on Niall Boylan's radio show to talk about direct provision. One of the points I made was totally and very deliberately misconstrued by the presenter. I want to repeat that point today, because it will crop up again. When an awful humanitarian situation arises in Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East, for example, the Government, under pressure from European counterparts, agrees swiftly, and rightly so, to take in a cohort of refugees from that country. It is wrong, however, that those refugees should leapfrog the people who are already in direct provision centres in this country. In County Clare, for instance, we have had families in direct provision from Congo, Ghana and many other war-torn countries that have faced horrors over the years. They have seen people coming in and leapfrogging them in the system - going into local authority housing, for example - when they have been in the system far longer. That is something the Department must weed out and stop happening. Direct provision is not an ideal system and somebody who has had to endure it for eight or ten years certainly should be housed and assimilated into all the supports that are available more quickly than someone who has just arrived from a situation of humanitarian crisis.

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