Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Minister did not answer my question about the number of commercially run centres, but I hope he will come back to it.

First, we both agree that the scrapping of this inhumane system has to be achieved. If the Minister achieves this, he can be proud but I contend that the entering by the Green Party into a coalition with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which have an appalling record on housing, the dispensing of public housing and lands into the private sector and pandering to the developer-led models they have, was bound to failure. Will the Minister comment on that?

This system was specifically designed effectively to punish people for coming here. In the words of officialdom in the past, it was to lessen the pull factor of coming to Ireland, as if somehow the oceans did not pull people away from either climate disaster, war or famine and all of the terrible things happening across the world in terms of societal collapse. We are failing in our international obligations to live up to that. I do not accept that the war in Ukraine is the whole reason. We were failing before the war.

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