Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

When I sat down this morning to prepare my words and think about what I was going to offer to this debate today, I thought about some of the images from last week of people in our international protection system being bussed to Crooksling and then walking back, of the testimony from their advocates and some of the conversations I had with some of those sleeping in tents over the last number of months and I could not step away from the question of when we became so cruel. It is not my intention to personalise this issue or to lay the blame squarely at the Minister's feet. Indeed, it is the Minister's colleagues in government who are using him to spare their own blushes, not the Social Democrats.

For over two years, the Social Democrats have called for an all-of-government approach. It was my party that raised in the Dáil the Minister's own letter to his Cabinet colleagues seeking help on the matter. Here we are again today, with a motion on the failures within our international protection system being discussed, and it is left to the Minister and his Green Party colleague to defend what the Social Democrats consider to be the indefensible. Where is the Minister for housing, Deputy Daragh O'Brien? Where are the Minister's cross-party Cabinet colleagues? What other Minister would be left to shoulder the sole responsibility for responding to a motion like this? We need more evidence that there is a whole-of-government approach to this catastrophe. We need a commitment to a whole-of-government response but such a commitment patently is not there. In fact, every time I hear a backbencher from Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael on the radio talking about the issue, it is the Minister's name they mention. They do not mention their own party colleagues in Cabinet. It is the Minister's name that they mention specifically.

In 2018, Ireland signed up to the EU reception conditions directive and transposed it into Irish law. This sets out the basic standard that we have committed to as a State, which is to ensure that applicants have access to housing and food, and that we give particular attention to vulnerable persons, especially unaccompanied children and victims of torture. Ireland needs to meet these basic conditions for those seeking international protection here. For over two years now, we have been operating in a state of emergency in the full knowledge that the day would come when we would not have enough accommodation for those arriving seeking refuge. We cannot allow this situation to become normalised, either from a moral or a legal standpoint. This obligation is on the State, not just the Minister's Department. It is an all-of-government obligation and we need leadership from the Taoiseach - whoever that may be in the coming weeks - the Minister for Housing and all of the Minister's Cabinet colleagues. Those colleagues are currently demonstrating a clear disregard for any degree of collective responsibility and although cruel in its own way, that is very obviously not the cruelty I referred to earlier.

None of us can deny that a humanitarian and public health crisis is intensifying because of the failure of the Government to provide adequate accommodation to asylum seekers. I note that the Minister said his Department is not meeting the basic minimum standards, a fair admission that I welcome. There is an obligation on the Government to provide adequate accommodation for asylum seekers that is warm and meets their basic needs. The Minister may say his Department is meeting the minimum standards but this is by no means adequate. The consequences of what is effectively a policy of State-sponsored hardship as a form of deterrent are being felt by real people every day on the streets of Dublin. I repeat, there is a policy of State-sponsored hardship as a form of deterrent, as echoed by the Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, when he urged people not to come here because there is no more room. He said that if they come here, they will be in a tent on the side of a mountain.

There are now more than 1,300 international protection applicants without accommodation in Ireland. The impression was given that the Mount Street encampment only emerged in the last two weeks but we know that is completely untrue. It began last April. Hundreds of international protection applicants are sleeping in tents in laneways, off the grid. The Minister mentioned the fact that most people who were not offered accommodation are elsewhere. Do we know where they are? Has anybody answered that question yet? Where are the rest of them accommodated? There were no toilets, running water or sanitation facilities at the tent encampment that grew up on Mount Street over the last year. Why not? When did we become a society that does not offer people access to a bathroom? That was allowed to persist for over a year. Whose responsibility is that? Is it Dublin City Council's responsibility? No one has dragged council representatives in and asked them why the council did not cater for the people on Mount Street. They were left in increasingly unsanitary and dangerous conditions, at risk of severe weather and violent attack. Tents at the same location were set alight in an arson attack carried out by a racist mob in 2023 but nobody has been brought before the courts and held accountable for that.

In a letter to The Irish Times on 13 March 2024, infectious diseases registrar Dr. Ralph Hurley O’Dwyer said that in recent weeks he had looked after multiple young male international protection applicants who were hospitalised with serious medical conditions as a result of sleeping outside in the cold. He said that the management of these conditions requires lengthy, costly hospital stays.

On 14 March 2024, Dr. Angy Skuce, medical director of Safetynet Primary Care, told RTÉ the conditions on Mount Street were inhumane and said she had treated people at the site with multiple serious health issues.

I say to all Ministers that parliamentary debate often involves people with opposing views or belief systems but I know full well that this is not the case here. Please, help us to understand how these outcomes and horrific treatment of vulnerable persons were deemed to be acceptable for so long. Allow me to ask a different question. If the roles were reversed and if we sat in the position the Minister occupies now and he sat in ours, would the Minister settle for the excuses that are now being offered? Would the Minister allow us to squabble over what number of toilets met a threshold of decency for frightened humans placed at the foot of a mountain over a bank holiday weekend? Would the Minister talk about the fact that one dirty toilet was false news or whatever he called it? He did not acknowledge the fact that the toilet in question was there on the site. There may have been other toilets but that filthy, horrible toilet was one of those offered to those humans who were sent there. Would he recoil as we accused their advocates of misinformation in presenting these scared people's fears of cold, disease, harassment or lack of nourishment in these isolated encampments of tents and tarpaulin?

Direct provision will have been in existence for 25 years in 2025. Again, I will not personalise it but certainly throughout at least 15 of those years, I have walked alongside progressive members of the left in this Chamber and elsewhere in this country in calling for the end to that horrific practice. Would any of us on those marches, at the information sessions hosted by refugee support groups, for a moment have accepted that as war intensified globally, as temperature increases led to famine in the Horn of Africa or elsewhere, as demand for sanctuary from those humanitarian catastrophes increases, our standards would plummet so far? We would not have. To do so is not progressive - it certainly is not my understanding of Christian - it is just cruel. I am conscious that as we have this debate, mother and baby home survivors are once more protesting their exclusion from the small redress scheme they were promised from their horrific treatment at the hands of the State. I began by asking when we became so cruel. Perhaps the honest answer is that we have never been anything but and, if nothing else, the State's approach to migrants over the last few months has given a clearer understanding of how the other horrors of this State were permitted to happen for so long.

Certainly, we remain very good at allowing others to monetise the suffering of the vulnerable. My colleague, Deputy Catherine Murphy, has already demonstrated that aspect very well in her contribution. Let me ask the Minister directly where the reception centres are? We have had a back-and-forth about beds that were vacant or otherwise but we are 24 months into this and I still have not seen where the reception centres are. The Minister stated there is a memo going to Cabinet next week. Why is that happening 24 months in? He is of course aware that in February 2021, Catherine Day published a White Paper which recommended providing six State-run reception and integration centres. Very quickly, for obvious reasons the Minister already has captured, that became outdated. In July 2023, Catherine Day published an update to her 2021 White Paper and stated six reception centres should urgently be provided. Where are they? In her updated paper, Ms Day said three centres should be delivered by the end of 2023 and a further three by the end of 2024. None of these State-run reception and integration centres have yet been provided. There have been media reports that the Government may defer identifying locations for these centres until after the local elections in June 2024. That is actually the exact wording in the motion, which the Government is not opposing. I cannot understand, if that is not the truth, why it would not vote against it. Allow me to tell the Minister directly that if it is the case that State-operated reception centres are being politicised to an extent that they are being held back until after an election, that is in itself abhorrent and I can think of no greater justification for any progressive person to walk away from this Government if that is a tactic.

In the last minute that I have, let me ask, who is it that we are afraid of? Who has made us become so cruel when people who I understand to have such commitment to humanitarian advocacy are inclined to turn away? Is it the people who are burning down these buildings and telling us to be scared of the people inside them? Is that who we are afraid of? I am certainly not, and the community I represent in Dublin Central and the north inner city is not reflective of that either. When I knock on doors every single night, as I have been over the last weeks and months, people are talking to me about the inhumanity being experienced by people. They are not telling us to be harsh in our treatment.

There are those who wish to tell us to be scared of religious extremism that may be exported to our shores. They do not talk about the scenario where we have a church in this country that still has not paid reparations to its own victims. We understand religious extremism, we have fought it - all of us have - and would do it again if necessary. I will not have people scaremongering to that degree. These are the people who want to make us believe that those coming here will increase violence against women, for example, without once acknowledging the fact that the most vulnerable place a women can be is at home, and the place she is most likely to be killed is in her own home by a partner known to her. They still want to tell us we are bringing in people who are a danger. There is an agenda to make scapegoats of people who come here in search of sanctuary from bombs falling on them or from starvation. I will not be complicit in the apologies of two decades' time. I think we all know what we stand for and the Republic we want to be involved in. Putting people in tents and tarpaulins is not reflective of that. Without apology, we bring this motion to the Dáil today. If we have to do it again in two months' time, we absolutely will.

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