Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The Bill is welcome and, like others, the Social Democrats will support this Bill. It is regrettable that we are at the 11th hour with this Bill coming forward. The Minister of State happens to be the one in the seat who is taking the criticism that can really be applied to his predecessors, because this has gone on for a long time. We have a serious problem in Ireland with human smuggling and human trafficking. With the current frameworks for identifying smuggling and trafficking, we do not have a clear picture of just how badly the State is failing vulnerable people. There are far more victims of human trafficking in Ireland than are officially recorded. A report by Mary Immaculate College has shown that numbers of adults and children trafficked into Ireland between 2014 and 2019 is at least 38% in the Republic of Ireland and 20% higher in Northern Ireland than is officially recorded by authorities. There is nothing in the Bill about the vital need for a comprehensive identification procedure for smuggled and trafficked people. We can strengthen the offences all we want but unless we can properly identify the people at risk, the State will continue to leave people vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. I note the Minister of State's comments and opening remarks that this is one part of a number of things that need to be done.

The failure to identify victims and protect people who claim to be victims of human trafficking was made clear years ago in the P case. The case concerned a Vietnamese woman who was discovered by gardaí locked in a grow house, charged with drug offences, and who spent two and a half years in custody. The woman claimed to be a victim of trafficking. The failure of gardaí to recognise this meant that she was deprived of the protection regime for victims of human trafficking. The court found that the State's administrative scheme for the recognition and protection of victims of human trafficking was inadequate to meet the obligations under EU law aimed at combating trafficking of human beings. Human smuggling and human trafficking are distinct issues. I agree with the Minister of State about that. He referred to it in his opening statement. It is important that we recognise the differences. It is recognised in the UN report.

As the Minister of State said, human smuggling is a crime which takes place only across borders where migrants are assisted to enter or to stay in a country illegally in exchange for some financial or material gain. People smugglers profit off the desperation or desire of migrants who are attempting to reach a better life in a new country. The crucial aspect of smuggling is that people consent to the smuggling venture, although in many cases the level of danger they experience in the crossing is not initially known to them or to their families. That is the case in the case referred to repeatedly here, of the Vietnamese people who unfortunately lost their lives in that tragic incident in Essex. People are put in often deadly conditions by smugglers, such as hostile sea journeys in unsafe vessels and often become the victims of severe human rights violations in the course of their journey. We saw that play out in the Mediterranean in recent years, with the perilous position and the loss of life there. Our Defence Forces, specifically the Naval Service, had an important role in intervening there that we were proud of.

These migrants are not criminals. It is important that we keep that fundamental truth in mind when legislating and debating human smuggling. Under international law, Governments are required to criminalise the smuggling of people not those who are smuggled. However, the boundaries between trafficking and smuggling often blur, since the crimes are often perpetrated by the same criminal networks along the same routes. I thank that Deputy Costello's point may well have been referring to that. Human trafficking involves the recruitment, movement or harbouring of people for the purpose of exploitation, including sexual exploitation, forced labour, slavery and even organ removal. The majority of victims of trafficking are women and girls. Global reports also indicate that children with disabilities are more likely to be trafficked.

In its 2021 report, the US State Department continues to list Ireland as a second-tier country in its trafficking of persons report. It is one of only two countries in the EU to receive such a poor ranking, the other being Romania. The report makes a number of recommendations and explains the rationale for the designation. It is hard to argue with its logic. It is hard to argue that we have not been failing victims of trafficking for years. That blame rests solely with the State. We have failed to identify victims properly, to enforce existing laws and to prosecute trafficking offences. I acknowledge that there was a prosecution in recent months. The lack of prosecutions has contributed to smugglers and criminal networks viewing trafficking and smuggling as low-risk offences with high profit margins. International best practice recommendations should be central to our mindset when discussing smuggling and trafficking. With that in mind, it was worrying to see the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission's, IHREC, submission to the general scheme of the Bill. It stated that the Bill is silent on the rights and protections of smuggled persons. That is a damning statement. IHREC is the State's human rights watchdog. It is also the national rapporteur on the trafficking of human beings. It is the expert body on human rights and trafficking in this country. I implore the Minister of State and his Department to look further at the recommendations about how this Bill can be strengthened.

Any measures that we introduce to control the entry and residence of irregular migrants must also be completely compliant with human rights and equality principles. Regardless of how people enter the country, they hold fundamental rights under the Constitution and international law. These rights include the right to life, the right not to be subjected to torture, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment, the right to liberty and security, the right to asylum, the right to fair procedures and the right to an effective remedy. The State continues to fail in this regard. We need only look at the conditions in direct provision centres or the appalling standards on so many of our fishing trawlers to see just how severely we have failed these people. We saw a story on social media in the last few days about how food is being dispensed in a direct provision centre. It is unacceptable for people to be given food in plastic bags. That kind of thing should not happen. I acknowledge that the Government has an ambitious programme, although I would like to see it happen more immediately. There is a significant change under way but that kind of thing is not acceptable.

I recognise that the Minister of State has taken some recommendations on board but many have not been.

Many of the recommendations were raised on Committee and Report Stages in the Seanad and I suspect they will be raised in this House. There were a number of amendments in the Seanad that the Minister of State indicated the Department would consider and that they would be returned to the Seanad when it was debated in this House. Will the Minister of State provide an update in his summing-up as to what he intends to bring forward? That may minimise the number of amendments put down.

I ask the Minister of State to look at including specific provision in the Bill for rights and protections for smuggled persons and rights of women, children and disabled people. There is often a desire in Departments to keep Bills somewhat condensed and to acknowledge shortcomings and a need to fix them, but insist they will be fixed at a later stage in another piece of legislation. We have an opportunity and responsibility to make this Bill as robust as possible, to protect the rights and lives of people who are smuggled, to ensure smugglers are criminalised and to ensure NGOs and human rights workers are not swept up by criminal charges.

A number of concerns were raised by IHREC that there was not enough safeguarding in place to protect people providing assistance to smuggled people for humanitarian and familial purposes. I note some of the comments in the opening statement. The debate in the Seanad seemed to indicate the Minister of State was reluctant to revise the definition of the smuggling offence so that more discretion could be given to the Judiciary. I respectfully ask him to reconsider his stance. A role of this House is to legislate, to make the law as clear as possible and to ensure laws are fair and appropriate. Leaving definitions purposely vague does not sit well with me. There is a risk of criminalising people who are attempting to help those in dire need.

We have seen many cases of this across Europe in recent years. One such case that comes to mind is that of Seán Binder, who grew up in Castlegregory in County Kerry. Seán was a rescue diver and trained in maritime search and rescue. He volunteered on the civilian rescue operations in Lesbos in Greece 2018. He was arrested and spent 106 days in a Greek jail before being released on bail following a campaign by friends, family, supporters and various human rights organisations. The charges against him include assisting human smuggling networks and he faces a potential 25 years' imprisonment. His role in Greece was to swim out from shore and rescue those struggling in the water. He also retrieved bodies of people who had drowned.

While this Bill deals specifically with the offence of human smuggling, the debate naturally includes human trafficking and it would be remiss to discuss human trafficking without talking about the appalling conditions in the Irish fishing sector. In the US State Department's report which I referenced earlier, the Irish fishing industry was specifically called out for leaving undocumented workers vulnerable to human trafficking. In the words of the International Transport Workers' Federation, a union representing fishers working at sea and on land:

The Irish government has allowed whole sectors of the economy to develop a low-wage model that can only be sustained by bringing in vulnerable workers from Asia and Africa. By their inaction, the State is allowing unscrupulous employers to regard these workers as totally expendable, as people they can hire and fire with impunity because of the inability or unwillingness of state agencies to uphold the law.

The widespread abuse of migrant workers in the Irish fishing industry has been acknowledged for years. Reports were first published in The Guardianin 2015, leading to a Government task force and the introduction of the atypical working scheme, AWS, which offered 500 12-month renewable permits to migrants already working in the fishing industry. If offered the permits to external applicants hoping for work thereafter, in 2016. A review of these measures was published in Maynooth University on 19 October and concluded that despite policy changes, the problems persist. From 2016 on, the US State Department, the International Transport Workers' Federation, the UN special rapporteurs and the Council of Europe have all expressed the view that the AWS did not have enough safeguards in place to prevent human trafficking and exploitation. Despite some changes to the scheme over the years, the workers in the Maynooth report say that conditions have worsened. The new regulations are not enforced and when inspectors are sent on board boats, migrant workers feel unable to talk to them or are prevented from doing so. There is a power and inequality issue there. One worker in the system said it was like a visa into slavery. We have to deal with that comprehensively.

The Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, carried out 454 inspections up to June 2021 on fishing boats and found that 323 instances breached conventions. These reports have been consistent. They have come from workers, journalists, unions, international bodies and human rights organisations. The State refuses to take them seriously and the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton's, response to the US State Department concerns about human trafficking in the fishing sector is concerning. She said:

No evidence has been found to support the allegations of widespread human trafficking in the fishing industry and it is worrying that the [US] State Department chose to place weight on one voice and not ... take account of the balance of stakeholder assessment – including assessment by NGOs active in Ireland in [trafficking of human rights].

We need an urgent review of that and owe it to the people who feel they are in a vulnerable position.

We often compartmentalise legislation and think that is done and that box is ticked. I welcome the fact the Minister of State said in his opening statement that this is one of a myriad of things that needs to be done. We have an obligation to put this legislation in place and a gun to our head in terms of time. We equally have an obligation to deal with this issue comprehensively and to deal with the substance of the problems. Part of that is understanding the extent of it, how we record it and how we deal with people in a humane way, putting victims' rights at the centre.

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