Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sickened to my core by the divisive nature of what has just taken place here. I want to thank the Social Democrats for bringing this motion. I would like to place a little context on it. I have less than four minutes so I will do my best. Two days after we celebrated our national identity, nationally and internationally, 1,320 people were living on the streets of Dublin in tents.

They were moved from Mount Street to another location which was adjacent to a site that had been subject to an arson attack. People seeking asylum are the most vulnerable people in society. They are fleeing war and persecution. It is extremely important to use these words because that is what asylum seekers are. In the majority of cases, they have made treacherous, lengthy journeys at huge personal cost. Some 29,250 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014. Last year alone, 3,129 died or went missing. Internationally, 110 million people have been displaced. Some 43.3 million of those people were children of whom 36.4 million were refugees.

I will make a comment in the time I have left, having given those figures. The two Ministers sit here today totally on their own. Dr. Catherine Day produced a report back in September 2020, which said there was an urgent need for a cross-government approach. The report pointed out, as earlier reports had also observed, that direct provision was inhuman and not fit for purpose. Some 24 years later, we are still left with it. Yes, of course, there were over 100,000 people fleeing from the war in Ukraine but that is not why the Government failed to do something. It failed to implement its own White Paper. It failed to implement Catherine Day’s recommendations and it has utterly failed to implement all the very modest recommendations from the McMahon report.

We sit here today with this kind of divisive debate, which is absolutely beneath all of us when really we are talking about a finite number of people who number 28,181 and of whom almost 6,000 have refugee status. If this rich country cannot cope with that finite number of people seeking asylum here then I give up.

On war in Ukraine, we have utterly failed to use our voices for peace. We have been part of the warmongering and the Government constantly eroding our neutrality. Of course we will not, as a small country, be able to accept every single asylum seeker. That is not what this is about. It is about enforcing and complying with our legal obligations while, at the same time, using our independence, sovereignty and neutrality as a voice for peace in the world and not for warmongering.

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