Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

One of the basic tenets of management is to measure what is happening. If we cannot measure what is happening, we cannot manage the situation. If I were to open a sweet shop on Main Street in Bray, I would need to know what is happening within that sweet shop or it would go bust. Despite myself and others trying to get the Minister to focus on measuring what is happening, there was a refusal to do so until two weeks ago. The most recent reply to a parliamentary question I asked of the Department stated it was not able to extract the information from the data. That is a flashing neon light suggesting incompetency.

The Taoiseach mentioned deportations. More than 7,000 applications have been refused in the past year but deportations have occurred in fewer than 100 of those cases. We saw last week under the Dublin III regulations that in only three of the 188 cases in which decisions were made was a person transferred.

We have legislation that has never been used. We are going to amend the legislation, yet the British are still refusing to accept returns. I am asking the Taoiseach how the Government will enforce that. Otherwise that emergency legislation is a distraction from fixing the situation.

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