Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

The Irish people are decent and generous and want to do their best to help those who are in need. Most Irish people want to provide supports for people fleeing violence and war. It is also important to state that communities across the country have welcomed migrants successfully and that many migrants make a very important contribution to both Irish society and the Irish economy. Aontú is a republican political party so we believe that everybody who is in Ireland should be treated equally and with fairness, no matter what their background is. The colour of a person's skin should have no more significance than the colour of their eyes. It is also the case that we need to call out racism where it exists. The Dublin riots shockingly brought a level of racism to the fore that I have never experienced in this country before.

We in Aontú have been calling for a respectful debate on immigration for the last four years. We live in a democracy and citizens have the right to say what is happening in their own country. For the last number of years, discussions on migration have been happening pretty much in every house across the length and breadth of the country. That has happened in every house except in the Houses of the Oireachtas. I believe the lack of debate has been a significant problem. If political representatives of the people do not discuss this issue respectfully, this debate does not disappear. It will be pushed underground into the hands of those who will use it for nefarious purposes. Ireland has a long history of taboo issues and brushing major problems under the carpet. The issues do not disappear. They always have to be dealt with.

Remember who we are. We are Teachtaí Dála. That means we are messengers of the people. Our job is to bring the concerns of the people into this Chamber and to debate them respectfully. People want a properly managed system of migration in Ireland. They also want a sustainable system.

Unfortunately, that is not what is happening so I am going to focus my debate on the Government's actions regarding migration policy. First, there is little or no consultation within local communities and we have raised this over and over again. The Government is ignoring local communities even when they bring forward proposals relating to accommodation solutions to the Government. This vacuum of information is a Petri dish for rumour on what is happening in those local areas and it is a direct result of the Government's actions. To date, we have also seen little or no community dividend in communities across the country. There has been no financial help given to communities in terms of providing health, education and transport to those communities under pressure. I put a parliamentary question to the Minister for Justice on this very recently regarding the community recognition fund, which was announced last year, and she told me that only €2.9 million of the €50 million assigned to this purpose, has ever been spent. The Government's application process is itself a dysfunctional process. There are approximately 14,000 people within the process and thousands of those are waiting two and three years for the first decision to be made. The longest wait by a person for a decision is waiting 14 years for the first decision and that is even before we talk about appeals. An applicant who is not an asylum seeker can remain in Ireland for up to ten years based on a process that is taking so long. This 14-year application process is putting resources under severe pressure and it means the State is providing accommodation to possibly thousands of people within the system who are not asylum applicants.

Another issue here relates to those people who come to the country without valid travel documents. There are absolutely situations where people leave countries that are war-torn, or where there have been major earthquakes who will not have travel documents, but there are also people coming from other European cities such as Paris and Berlin, without travel documents. It would have been necessary for them to have travel documents to get on those flights but the Government is not tightening up on this particular issue either.

Another important issue on which the Government is not focusing is that 76% of people who are applying for asylum in this State at the moment are not doing it at the airports or at the ports; they are applying at the International Protection Office. This means they have come on other types of visas and at the end of that visa are then applying for asylum, or that they are coming through the North of Ireland. I submitted a parliamentary question to ask the Minister for Justice how many people are coming through the North of Ireland in this process and she said she does not know. Again, this is representative of a lack of management that the Government is involved in. It should be in communication with our counterparts in London to ensure we have checks in Larne and in Belfast Airport to make sure we know how many people are coming to Ireland through this particular route. Another frustration people experience relates to deportations. Some 75% of people who receive a deportation order from this Government never have their deportation order ever enforced, which is an incredible situation. We have a voluntary deportation system in Ireland. Therefore, after a very expensive asylum application process system, the people who are successful and those who are not, actually have the same outcome which is a very serious issue.

The other issue is the Government's lack of provision for accommodation. A reply to another parliamentary question I put to the Minister found that the vast majority - 80% - of locations where asylum seekers are located, are either hotels or guest houses. This means there are downstream tourism pressures on incomes for families working in those types of towns. The dependency on those accommodation centres is because the Government is useless in the delivery of other locations for asylum seekers. The Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, promised over a year ago now that 700 rapid-build homes would be provided for Ukrainian refugees. Just 204 of those have been built at the moment. Some 85% of the pledged rooms in private homes for Ukrainians were never realised at all, and where Ukrainian and other asylum seekers have settled well, it has been a policy of the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, to often uproot them and move them to other locations. Therefore, any efforts to integrate into host communities have been damaged significantly.

The Government is implementing a yellow pack migration system into this country. What I mean by that is that it simply looks for locations for accommodation and then leaves the host communities and the migrants themselves without the necessary supports or the integration efforts they need. This is a significant part of the problem that is happening in this country. This State has international responsibilities but we also have domestic responsibilities. We need to do what we can to help those who are in need but we also need to make sure it is sustainable. If we are going to bring in a population that is bigger than Galway city on an annual basis, without the resources such as the universities, the hospitals, the dozens of schools and the tens of thousands of homes, we will create great stresses within Irish society. We need a policy of compassion but we also need a policy of common sense and that is sorely missing at the moment.

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