Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to be able to speak on this. I am sorry I was not here for the earlier speakers. I do not know what goes on at these meetings. I am not very happy with what goes on. We seem to be passive and dumb, just nodding at everything we are told to do by the EU, whether it is farming or the fishing industry, which have been wiped out over the decades. The Minister of State, Deputy Burke, is relatively new in the Department, and goodness knows we miss him out of his previous position - I do anyway. Now he is Minister of State in this job out there. I hope he will not be out there just to make up the space. Why do Poland and Hungary have to be the outliers, looking for justice and fairness? We all know there is a war going on, but our involvement in that war is getting heavier and heavier and deeper and deeper, and we see now the cluster bombs being put there. Why are we sleepwalking into a deal whereby, if we are unable to, and "unable" is the word, because although the Irish people have shown how willing and able they are to take in people and we did so voluntarily in the spirit of the meitheal, our Government now says just keep sending them in, and from the Taoiseach to the Tánaiste and the Tánaiste to the Taoiseach, both gentlemen at different times have talked about up to 200,000, even though we simply cannot look after them, they are being mistreated, sleeping in tents in different places, and being moved from here to there and so on, we could now be made pay severe fines without any recourse to justice because we signed up to this. The Ministers involved should be ashamed of themselves. They are supposed to represent the Republic of Ireland, our people and our democracy. Where is the democracy?

I have called for a referendum on this issue but, of course, that has fallen on deaf ears. There is a kind of unwritten rule here that we cannot talk about this. Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. We cannot even mention it in this Chamber. We have to get real and look after our people here and, certainly, to the best of our ability, genuine refugees who come here. I have called for a cap of 30,000. I do see lately, and I must acknowledge this, a tightening up of the issue of people coming in with no passports from various non-war-torn parts of the world. That was a racket. I raised it in the House two years ago. There were 3,150 in the first three months of 2021. That has been tightened up, which I welcome, but it cannot be eased off again. We cannot be just the soft fall guys taking people from peaceful countries where there is no war at all going on coming in with no paperwork and arriving in Dublin Airport. They should be on the same plane back or we should fine the airlines or do something to try to control that.

I am very disappointed by what goes on at European level. We had the vote today on the nature restoration law. We had political parties here posturing and their groups in Europe posturing as to what they were going to do, yet all our Fine Gael MEPs, I understand, voted for that. They say one thing to the people on the ground and do a different thing in Brussels. They will be found out very soon.

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