Patricia Ryan (Kildare South, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Like my colleagues, I welcome the Bill. It is timely we are having this debate today. During the summer, there was the first ever conviction under the existing anti-people smuggling legislation and we must consider why it took so long. We must consult An Garda Síochána and other agencies to seek their opinions on necessary reforms in this area of law.

The purpose of the Bill is to bring Irish legislation into line with an EU directive. It also allows for specific circumstances in which a person may be brought into the country by a designated organisation for the purposes of seeking asylum, which the existing law does not provide for.

Twenty years ago next month, a lorry driver in Rosslare transporting what was supposed to be a load of furniture from Milan noticed the customs seal on the load was broken. Gardaí were called and discovered that 13 people had been in the container for more than five days. Eight of them, including four children, had suffocated. The migrants had paid traffickers up to €15,000 to be transported west. The traffickers had assumed the container would be unloaded in Dover but it was sent directly to Ireland. A trial of the people smugglers at the centre of that incident heard the group made up to €12 million a year from human trafficking. Two ringleaders were convicted in a Belgian court in 2003, but they fled the country. One of them was apprehended in 2012 but the court annulled that conviction. Some of the survivors of the tragedy settled in Dublin and Wexford. I remember politicians at the time shedding tears and saying it would never happen again, yet tragedies like it continue to happen all over Europe.

Research by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, has shown that the lack of effective legislation and criminal justice processes to address people smuggling has contributed to the smugglers and criminal networks viewing smuggling as a low-risk, high-reward offence. That needs to change. People who pay these smugglers do not place themselves and their families in danger without good reason. Many of them are fleeing religious or political persecution. All of them are seeking a better way of life. We know this only too well from our history of emigration in this country. The nature of their transport to Europe means many refugees find themselves in situations that have led to exploitation and forced prostitution, as referred to by Deputy Martin Kenny. That cannot be allowed to continue.

This Bill will allow for designated organisations to bring asylum seekers to Ireland without fear of prosecution. We must put safeguards in place to ensure all designated organisations are vetted properly to reduce any risk of exploitation. In its 2020 report, The Challenges of Human Trafficking in the Digital Era, Europol notes that information and communications technology has changed the criminal landscape. Traffickers have adopted new methods and ways to recruit, control and exploit victims. We must respond in kind.

Before I conclude, I want to highlight the delays in processing asylum seekers. Additional resources must be provided to INIS and the Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation to help them to deal with the backlog. The Government must deliver an end to direct provision. Companies should not be profiting from human misery.

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