Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

This debate is a facade. The Government will be able to point to it to claim there was a debate in advance of the Government opting in, which it has already decided to do. It will be in advance of the various legislation that will be required.

When we talk about legislation, there are five Stages to Bills, the first of which is when a Bill is published and considered in advance of speaking to it. The Second Stage is about the detail of the legislation and the principle of it. What will we be doing when legislation is presented to us? We are supposed to be talking about the principle of it but we have already opted in. This is doing things backwards. We all know that with legislation, the devil is in the detail. We want to see the detail. We have made changes in this House whereby we now have pre-legislative scrutiny to go through proposed legislation in great detail in advance of its publication.

Essentially the Bills that will follow are pointless. The decision to opt in has already been made and the detail is something we are going to have to live with. That is absolutely the wrong way to go about this.

I have no doubt that there are things that have to be done on an EU-wide basis and there are parts of what is proposed that we certainly believe have strong merit. We see serious merit in the Eurodac system, with its database. For a range of different reasons, we could live with other aspects of the measure but other parts present a particular difficulty. I am trying to get my head around the situation where people will arrive here but they will not have arrived "here". They will be in some location close to the airport or a port that will not be called Ireland. It will be a location that is not deemed to be the State. We are told it will not be a detention camp. What if people leave and get the bus into town? Are they suddenly "here"? We are being given a pat on the head and told they will not be detention centres. I want to see the detail of something like that because there is the potential for real infringement of rights of people who are arriving, sometimes from war-torn countries and in considerable personal turmoil. I am not at all satisfied with what we are being told about that and I am not going to take an assurance from the Government. I want to see the detail in writing. We are not going to see that detail.

Several human rights organisations are concerned about safeguards. The Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, is right about people being fair here. I found that on the doorsteps when people saw that somebody had arrived here seeking refuge, coming from a country where there was a war. People felt that of course we need to treat people fairly and the process they go through needs to be fair. However, organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF, have decried the pact as having harmful practices. I admire an awful lot of what MSF does in the world. Others are concerned about the lack of ability to go through a legal process.

As I say, there is merit in some aspects of what is being proposed but the lack of detail is completely unacceptable. There are several separate Bills that we will have to go through.

When we look at the various regulations that are going to be turned into legislation, there is an issue that is not being raised about the European Union. I do not see where the European Union's strategy is to actually deal with the conflicts in the countries from which much of the migration is coming. There is a large weapons or armaments industry in Europe. That could be, and probably is, enabling some of the wars that are taking place in different parts of Africa and the Middle East, in close proximity to Europe, where some of the migration is flowing from. I do not see where the big initiative in the European Union is to deal with peace in those locations. It certainly is not part of this conversation or narrative.

That is a huge missing piece. People do not get up and leave their homes. Most migrant flows are not to Europe but to neighbouring jurisdictions that are much poorer than any country in the European Union. Those countries are having trouble dealing with that.

The European Union is framed as having coming out of a peace initiative of peace after the Second World War and following on from the First World War. I would have thought that would be a lesson that should be expanded elsewhere. Look at the chaotic position in arriving at a common view on Palestine. It is extraordinary how different the European Union is and the lack of cohesion in it about peace.

Ireland is a country that is more about emigration than immigration. It is only relatively recently that we have seen any kind of migrant numbers. Most of the people who come here do so to work. They get employment permits and so on. It is only very recently that we are starting to see a small but significant number of people arriving as part of the most recent migrant flow into Europe. We tend to forget how we were treated in other countries when we left, including by our closest neighbour, and the resentment that people felt about that treatment, even now. There is an idea that we were welcomed in the United States after the Famine. Anyone who reads history knows that is not the case and that people had a real struggle there. We have to understand those struggles because we have had a history of them. I am concerned we are not doing that.

We have been working in a chaotic way since the start of the direct provision system It was shameful. Before there was ever war in Ukraine, that system was well beyond acceptable. We have not dealt with this question very well in this country. The way it has been handled has created chaos. People understand. I was knocking on doors during the recent election campaign. If anyone believes the national narrative, I met very different people on the doors. People were concerned about a range of issues connected with migration. They were concerned about people sleeping in tents, the chaotic way people were finding hotel rooms at the last minute and the lack of any kind of planning, even two years after the war in Ukraine started. Adopting this pact will not change that. We do not even know where these six centres will be, for example. They have been announced but we are not told their locations. There are many things we could do that would deal with the practical aspects of the most recent migrant flows. I do not see anything practical or urgent being done in respect of those six centres.

Outsourcing provision has become very problematic. Fortunes are being made by particular individuals. I am concerned about the vetting of some of the locations and individuals who are running them, a concern I have expressed before.

I am unhappy with the way this issue has been handled. This is a facade of a debate.

See this speech in context