Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I too feel compelled to be very critical of the system of direct provision. It has been an abject failure.

I have visited the centre in Carrick-on-Suir a number of times over the years and have seen the way families are incarcerated there. These are, in the main, traumatised people who have come from very harrowing and desperate situations. I visited refugee camps outside Lebanon some years ago and saw the children and the old women. There was nobody else there. They are traumatised and are waiting there. Then they come here to Ireland of the thousand welcomes and my God, what a welcome. We heard the shocking figure of over 400 children going missing from these incarceration centres - that is what they are. We are here every day debating the Mother and Baby Homes and the horrific situations that went on here. This will be as bad when history looks back on what we are doing to our guests. We offer, and agree at European level and United Nations level, to take so many people. Direct provision is a gravy train for the people who have the buildings. They do not care, they just provide the house, get the money and run. The services are not there. I salute the community in Carrick-on-Suir for the way it has integrated them into the schools, GAA clubs and everything else. It is wonderful to see some of them who are athletes and everything. However, it just takes too long, is too cumbersome and too slow.

What is wrong with our Department of Justice and now the Department of Children, Disability, Equality and Integration that they cannot operate this? How can we have 440-odd children go missing and no talk about them? They just vanished into the sex trade, into child prostitution and slave labour. This is when all our eyes are open to what went on in the past, when we were supposedly backward and we did all kinds of things. We have learned so much now and we are so open, so pluralist, so engaging, yet this is going on under our noses.

It is the same with the housing assistance payment, HAP, system. We throw billions of euro into HAP payments to keep people in long-term rented accommodation instead of building, and Deputy Michael Collins has given us the figure of how many homes could have been built. We have an awful lot of dirty linen to wash and the linen is being dirtied all the time. Our Departments have failed miserably. Their ineptitude and that of Tusla is appalling. Above all, there is no accountability, none whatsoever. We throw money at it and have tribunals and inquiries. Common decency is what we should be about. It sickens me to my craw to see people talk about how we are this and we are that, while this is going on at the very same time. We exposed what went on 40 years ago when our people were meant to be backward, when they did their best with what they could. Now, however, when we know everything - knowledge is a wonderful thing - and we have all kinds of rights we let this go on endlessly, year in and year out for decades.

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