Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Sometimes I think we are having two debates about asylum seekers. There seems to be a debate in the political and media bubble and one happening outside in the real world. There is a disconnect between the two debates and what is happening around the issue of asylum seekers. Most Irish people want to help those who are fleeing violence, famine and war. Most want to be Good Samaritans and to help people in their times of need. However, it also must be said that we need common sense as we approach this major issue. Many asylum seekers have settled well and been welcomed well. That is wonderful news. However, the Government has created enormous difficulties in this process in recent years. We are well into a year of a high increase in the number of asylum seekers arriving in the country and still little or no consultation is happening with communities. That is incredible. Even people who want to help with finding locations for people seeking asylum are being ignored or not being allowed into the process of consultation at all. That is a mistake.

To date, there have been little or no community dividends. We must accept that many asylum seekers are being located in regional or working class areas. They are not being located in leafy suburbs. That is also a difficulty. Many of these working class areas are suffering significantly from the lack of investment in housing, health, education and transport. If larger populations are going to be put into those working class areas, we must ensure a community dividend is put in place so that resources can be provided for locals and newcomers.

The biggest issue I have with the Government's approach to this is the complete dysfunction in the asylum application process. Some 14,000 people are currently waiting for an asylum process decision to be made. The median processing time is approximately a year and a half, but thousands of people are waiting two and three years for their first decision to be made. One person is waiting 14 years for the first decision to be made on an asylum application - that is incredible - and that is before an appeal is even mentioned. The job of the asylum application process is to differentiate between those who are real asylum seekers who we need to help and those who are economic migrants. That is the purpose of the system. However, if a decision is yet to be made about 14,000 applicants, that means the State is providing accommodation for economic migrants among those numbers. Given the pressure we are under that does not make sense.

It has also been reported that last year 5,000 people came to Ireland seeking asylum without documentation or using false documentation. That is also incredibly wrong and the Government is not cracking down and making the process stricter to ensure that does not happen in the future. We need to get to grips with that element of the asylum process. The end of the process is mind boggling. Between 2018 and last year 4,631 deportation orders were issued to people who had failed the asylum application process. As of last year, 3,887 of the people who had received deportation orders had not left the country. The Government had no understanding of where they were. The Government is presiding over a voluntary deportation order system at the moment. That is also incredible given the pressure we are under. The idea that those who are successful in their application for asylum and those who are not would have exactly the same outcome in the end, i.e. that they can stay in the country, is incredibly wrong. We are spending millions of euro on that differentiation process and it is not actually differentiating an outcome for people in the long run.

Today I received a reply to a parliamentary question from the Minister on the location of accommodation for asylum seekers. The answer stated that 146 hotels, guesthouses and bed and breakfast accommodation are being used by the Government to accommodate asylum seekers. In total, only 33 other locations are being used. That means that 80% of locations that are being used to house asylum seekers are in the hospitality sector. That is putting enormous pressure on a sector which provides livelihoods for tens of thousands of people, especially in regional Ireland. There are many downstream tourism businesses that are dependent on throughput of tourists in those hotels, guesthouses and bed and breakfast accommodation for their living to be made. They depend on that to pay their rents and mortgages and to put food on the table for their children.

One of the reasons for this massive dependency on the hospitality sector is that the Government's incompetence, that is visible in housing, healthcare and education, is completely visible in this sector too. The Government promised this time last year that 500 modular homes would be in place by October and not one of them is in place at the moment. Some 85% of the pledged homes for Ukrainian refugees were never activated by the State. Of the 500 buildings the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, identified last April, today only a dozen of those are in use. Of the more than 30 buildings the Government bought for asylum seeker accommodation, we understand that only three are in use. There are major difficulties in this, therefore.

I mention the situations where asylum seekers and Ukrainians are settling well in a community and integrating with the help of the local community. In many cases they are then uprooted by the Government and told to move to another location where the integration process has to be done again, which is illogical.

We have responsibilities internationally which we need to fulfil but we have domestic responsibilities too. The Government needs to have compassion in dealing with this area but we also need to have common sense, and that is sorely missing.

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