Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I realise the Minister is under extraordinary pressure given the crisis and the number of people who have come in from Ukraine. There are almost 40,000. It would be remiss of me not to point out that we have had numerous reports. We had the McMahon recommendations, as the Minister knows well, in 2015. We have had the Catherine Day report. We have various Ombudsman's reports and we have had the White Paper.

We are into the 22nd year of direct provision and now we have the completely unacceptable situation where we are distinguishing between different types of asylum seekers and people coming into our country. While we take in the Ukrainians - we all have thanked the Minister for that - with open arms, by comparison we have taken in a minute number of people from Afghanistan. I understand their number is even less than 700. The Afghan admission programme has a limit of 500 persons and they must be joining family.

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