James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I might need one to keep up with you, although that might be to your credit, given you are a busy man, as I know. I do not want to personalise this, but I do want to rebut very strongly any Member suggesting there was not adequate time, which is completely incorrect.

On another point, this is not by any means the end of the debate on the pact. The next Dáil might feature a different government and who knows at what stage the pact will be taken on. Regardless of the vote, whenever it is taken, if the pact is to be enacted and if the Houses vote for it, my understanding is it will go through primary legislation, which will come back before the Houses and the committees.

There will be pre-legislative scrutiny and further engagement with experts. Any member of the committee is entitled to suggest any expert, as is always the case, from whatever side of the spectrum they are on. There will be primary legislation, amendments, Committee and Report Stages and Seanad and Dáil debates - the whole kit and caboodle. At the risk of repeating myself, the suggestion that this process is rushed or inadequate seems to be a useful talking point for those who oppose the pact in the first instance.

What do those experts say? What do those stakeholders say? They say a variety of things and it is fair to characterise the opposition to this pact as coming, in some cases, from the right and, in other cases, from the left. Of the stakeholders who attended committee meetings, undoubtedly some were opposed to it. Typically, it was those coming from what might be termed a "human rights perspective" because they felt it was unfair, inhumane or lacked dignity - perhaps the camps on certain borders where people are kept in holding pens before they can be processed. Some people coming from the left found that to be undesirable from a human rights perspective and I understand that, to an extent.

I find people on the right using the talking points of people on the left, and perhaps it is a badge of convenience to find something to say against the pact. It is ironic that it seems to be most opposed in Ireland by those who might identify as being on the right, even though the European Union would tend to say the pact has been hardened. There was a fear among some in the European Union the pact had gone too far to the right as a result of forces within Europe that pushed it that way and yet some still oppose it here.

Mr. David Leonard, an immigration expert who practices immigration law, said that this was "an imperfect consensus based [up]on compromise". That is a reasonably good description of it. I do not want to offend anybody but if I say that, as a general rule of thumb, if there is legislation or a proposal that both the hard right and the hard left oppose, it is probably a reasonably sensible proposition. I do not want to give offence to anybody by saying that but, as a centrist politician, if something faces opposition from both the hard right and hard left, it probably means it is a reasonable, middle ground compromise.

Mr. David Leonard also gave an analogy, which I thought was very useful. He talked about the idea of going it alone and the idea that Ireland would somehow be an outlier in Europe. I heard the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, speak about the Brexiteers who thought they would go it alone in the world. That did not work out so well and there is now more immigration than ever to Britain. The Brexiteers also forgot that EU migration was the least of their worries. They forgot about their former Commonwealth countries which all came back to say hello 40 years later. Mr. David Leonard talked about taking a computer network, upgrading it with antivirus and cybersecurity software, patching it to the latest requirements and having an ultra-smooth-running network but forgetting about one node on the network or even one solitary server running an old software version. He spoke about the obvious risks and vulnerabilities that go with that and the fact the computer can be compromised. Not being in sync with the network makes it not stronger but far weaker than the others. He applied that analogy to the pact and if Ireland was to decide to go it alone, to stand outside the other measures and countries and to say we will do our own thing, make up our own rules and work this out ourselves even though this is not just a continental but a global challenge. I thought that was a very sensible analogy.

The point about sovereignty has been raised and it strikes me as a convenient way to avoid saying where a particular party or group stands on the issue. We are concerned about sovereignty but what about the seven chapters of the pact? From chapter one to chapter seven, which are they for or against? They do not have to answer that question because they say it is about sovereignty. I am speaking to the Sinn Féin benches in this regard. I am directing my remarks that way because that seems to have been the Sinn Féin response, that is, that it does not want to surrender sovereignty. Every European Union treaty we have ever signed or every pact we have ever entered into has, to a degree, involved that.

If we go back to first principles, how did we get to a democratic state and civilisation in the first place? We pooled sovereignty. That was the whole idea of Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; where we evolved to a situation where we made collective decisions for the common good. Pooling sovereignty is where that came from. We agreed Leviathan would be the centre into which we would pool sovereignty for the collective good and protection of all. That is how it works. That is how democracy works. That is how this Chamber and the European Parliament work. That is how the whole planet works - those states that are based on democratic, civilised systems. That is a good thing and something we have been working towards for the best part of a century. Maybe that is worth reiterating.

The current system is not perfect and I do not have time to go into all of the issues. I agree with Senator McDowell when he talks about how some of the regulations we are operating under are based on 1950s international treaties. They were pre-Internet, pre-cheap travel and flights, and pre-social media. The idea that for the price of a meal multiple economically motivated migrants could get on a flight from one continent to another was unheard of or not envisaged at that time and I agree there needs to be an upgrade and it needs to be revisited. I agree different motivations may apply to many arrivals now than what were envisaged under those pacts. That is all the more reason we need to upgrade our system, and like the expert said at the committee, we need to upgrade our software, patch it up and make sure it is the latest version and running as all of the other nodes are.

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