Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Once again, I begin a contribution on a justice matter by having to refer to the time lag between an EU or international legal instrument being adopted and mandated on Ireland and our accepting it, and legislation being presented to this House to transpose it into domestic law. The two European Council directives we are dealing with in this legislation date back to 2002 and the UN protocol dates back to 2000. The Department has acted to transpose the directives because not doing so means Ireland will no longer have access to the Schengen information system, SIS, from the end of next month. It seems the Oireachtas waits to debate legislation of this kind until there is either a punitive case being taken against us in the European court or there is some significant consequence for Ireland in not acting. These are instruments, from both the EU and elsewhere, that we willingly and voluntarily sign up to but have a great reluctance to sign into law.

Being part of the SIS is really important to us. It allows our customs and emigration authorities to have access to information about alerts on wanted persons, missing persons, stolen vehicles and a range of other information that is essential for those authorities to function properly. In this instance, I accept there may be some excuse in regard to the original EU directives insofar as we did not opt in because we are not part of the Schengen Agreement, but there is a pattern to how we deal with such matters. The Minister of State seems to have taken a lot of backlogged EU directives off the shelf in recent times. I commend him on that. However, there is something in the way this House functions that is leading to the issues in this area. Once upon a time, there was a Dáil subcommittee on secondary legislation that looked at directives and why they had not been transposed. That is something we might look at again.

In his opening statement, the Minister of State pointed out the important and significant difference between people smuggling, which is facilitating the irregular movement of people across borders for financial or other benefits, and human trafficking, which is the recruitment, transportation and exploitation of persons. These are most serious matters. People smuggling is one of the horror crimes of our times. Desperate individuals and families undertake often horrific journeys to seek a better life for themselves and their families.

I recently watched a truly shocking television documentary setting out the details, in all their horror, of what happened to the Vietnamese men, women and children, as referred to by other Deputies, whose bodies were found in Essex in 2019. Seeing their last desperate text messages, sent when they knew they were dying and already surrounded by the dead, was quite numbing. We saw, too, their home villages in Vietnam and their families and friends. In echoes of millions of our own people and predecessors, they left their country villages in search of a better future. Whole families gathered together the money to pay for those journeys, a debt that will take a generation for many of them to pay back. It really was a horror story.

Closer to home, I remember vividly the day in December 2001 when a container was opened in Drinagh business park in Wexford town, no more than a mile from my own home. Eight Turkish males, including four children, were found suffocated inside that sealed box. Five others miraculously survived. I remember going to Wexford General Hospital that day. I remember in particular talking to the then parish priest of Wexford, Fr. Jim Fegan, whom the Minister of State would know well. He was one of the people, together with local ambulance crews and members of An Garda Síochána, who had to go inside that place of suffering. The experience is still seared on those people. There is a beautiful memorial to those who died at the site in Drinagh. I occasionally go out to that quiet and calm place. I remember the inauguration of the memorial a year after the tragedy. Anybody who attended will still be impacted - I would say, traumatised - by the memory of the relatives who attended, the words spoken and the keening of one elderly grandmother for the loss of her grandchildren.

The point I am making is that this is about the real suffering of real people. Sometimes when we talk about these issues, we lose sight of the fact these are human beings trying to get on with life and make a better future for themselves. Unfortunately, this is still happening. Our laws must be robust enough to dissuade in the clearest terms those who would engage in people smuggling and the exploitation of people in this way. Their blood money is gathered at a very high price indeed.

This clearly is an international crime that can only be effectively combated on an international basis. The instruments we are enacting criminalise the facilitation of people smuggling into any member state of the European Union or state party to the United Nations protocol. I understand how our experience of the operation of the Illegal Immigrants (Trafficking) Act 2000 has proven problematic, as the Minister of State has referenced in his opening comments, especially the challenge presented by our prosecution authorities in proving, in a court of law, the for-gain motivation. However, this is an extraordinarily difficult area and we want to be careful and clear in the law.

The Minister has crafted a different approach, the so-called for humanitarian purposes defence, to be made available to those who would facilitate people moving into our State or the European Union, not for gain, but motivated by humanitarian reasons. That defence must be there. A defence from prosecution or conviction is extremely important. We have seen where clear humanitarian support to migrants has, in jurisdictions including in the European Union, been deemed unlawful and the humanitarian support given to desperate people has been criminalised. That cannot be right and cannot be our approach. I do not suggest it is the approach of the Minister or the Government.

We have to be careful and clear in how that balance is calibrated in that those who see the exploitation and smuggling of people as a commercial business and have no regard for the well-being or welfare of men, women and children must have the full rigours of the law used against them. Those who genuinely want to assist desperate people in a struggle for a better life cannot be criminalised. The section 9 humanitarian assistance defence is of the utmost importance.

The area highlighted for attention by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission is the lack of clear rights and protections for the people being smuggled because most of our focus has been on the smugglers rather than the smuggled. We need to step back and ensure the people I have described and their families also fall within our purview and are dealt with properly. What is to become of people found to have been smuggled? What clear rights and protections do they have? Some of the survivors of that horror story in my home town of Wexford, as has been said, settled in Wexford and subsequently in Dublin.

It cannot simply be a matter of a humanitarian gesture to be given in an extreme case such as that by the Department or Minister for Justice. We need to have an established policy on how we deal with the victims in all of this - the smuggled people. What is our approach to them? How are they to be dealt with? What fundamental rights do they have? It is an issue we need to deal with in the context of the legislation we are advancing here today.

I grant it that these are difficult and challenging issues to address, issues that need to be approached from a humanitarian perspective. That would be the view across this House. We have been fortunate in this jurisdiction so far that, by and large, there has been a large consensus of view among the elected representatives of this House on how to deal with such matters. We have not had the far right approach that is becoming more and more prominent in other European countries and elsewhere throughout the world, where a fortress Europe is wanted and no regard is had for those desperately seeking to improve themselves. That may be because of our own history seared in our souls and memories, but we need to be vigilant to ensure that is protected and that mind frame is not organically growing on the ground, especially through some of the most awful social media sites growing in this jurisdiction, as they have across the globe.

These are not easy questions to settle. We must see people who go to such lengths to improve their circumstances and their family's future in a complete and whole way, to seek to understand their experiences and support their needs. What they have already endured has been immense in getting to our shores. A country with our experience has a unique and particular responsibility to be mindful. We can tease these things out.

I welcome the conclusion of Second Stage. I ask the Minister to give a clear exposition of what rights smuggled persons have, what his intention is, what statutory underpinning it has and whether it needs such an underpinning, even in this legislative measure we have before us. It would give us all an easement that we would be robust, clear and definitive in striking as strong a blow as we can against those who would smuggle and exploit people, while being as compassionate as we can possibly be to those who are smuggled and are seeking to build a better life here.

I will touch on another issue I raised previously, which is the operation of Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service, INIS. I have no doubt the good women and men who populate INIS are of the finest calibre and do a sterling and great job. The problem is, in crafting the legislation, we put a barrier of secrecy on how it does its business. When individuals come to us to try to ascertain their status, and I am certain this happens to all of us because many individuals come to me, we have no option but to put down a parliamentary question, which with all due respect is a pointless exercise because it just goes to INIS, or to email INIS, which is the more likely option, in which case we get a standard reply stating that according to the GDPR law it cannot provide any information and the client should look at the tracking of his or her application.

That is not the way any other service operates in this State. Without oversight, any service is vulnerable. We get significant criticism, as Deputies, for our clientelist way of operation. I make no apology for that. All of us, individually, regard ourselves as an ombudsman for our own people. I am quite certain that people go into public authority with a strength by saying they will get Deputy Catherine Murphy or Deputy James Browne to table a question on a matter or to raise it. That is a strength for people, but we need to have the capacity to hold all public officials to account and that is not there with INIS. The opaqueness of INIS does not serve INIS as an organisation, just as it does not serve us or the individuals who simply want to know what their status is. It can go on for years like that.

After six months, eight months or a year, INIS could tell people they need to submit a document, sometimes one that had been forwarded in the first place. Then the clock on the application starts ticking again. There seems to be no way of challenging that because of the structure of INIS. I have made this point before. I ask the Minister of State to look at the legal framework that underpins the service. That would be a great boon for transparency in the operation of our immigration services and a great asset to the most vulnerable of people who are new to us, many of whom are fearful of authority. We have seen that in the vaccines uptake. Some people have an experience of authority and government that is very different from the casual and open way that, thankfully, our people interact with politicians. We need to have that openness. I ask that the Minister of State have a look at the underpinning legislation for INIS. He might make some alterations if there is a difficulty.

As we all know, the whole GDPR issue has been a boon to those who want to shield transparency and make information more opaque. We need to have a balance between the oversight of all public administration and the right of individuals to privacy. Deputies do not make a representation because we are thinking of somebody and picking them out off the street. We do so because somebody comes to us and asks us to make a representation as his or her elected representative. This is a matter that needs to be addressed.

This is important legislation, which is not particularly complex. It will give a new arm to prosecute those who have been difficult to prosecute because of the existing need to prove a for-profit motive. If we can overcome that, we will be able to prosecute those manipulators of humanity and human desperation. If we can put them to the sword, it will be a good day. The Bill will certainly have the Labour Party’s support in trying to achieve that.

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