Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I join with colleagues who earlier expressed their condolences on the passing of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh and Tommie Gorman. It is a very sad day for Ireland to see two such wonderful people pass away, people who have made such an enormous contribution to society in so many different ways.

I support the EU migration and asylum pact and will vote for it tomorrow. In the short time available I want to make a few points. The first is to pick up on what Deputy Stanton said. People involved in this debate underestimate the extent to which it is push factors that cause people to migrate in a way that is irregular or, in some cases, illegal. We should not underestimate that. We see, for example, that the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union to take control of its borders. It decided to introduce as official policy a hostile environment for migration. It made it its official policy to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. What do we see happening so far in the UK this year? Record numbers of people are arriving in small boats from continental Europe to the United Kingdom. Why is that happening? Record numbers of asylum seekers are crossing the Mediterranean into Italy, despite the fact that a radical right government was elected there. Despite the fact that we here in Ireland can no longer provide accommodation for asylum seekers – approximately 2,000 are now unaccommodated, welfare payments have been cut back and the regime is being quite frankly tightened and hardened - we see record numbers arriving as well. It is not because Ireland, Britain, Europe or any country is some sort of soft touch. It is not the case that governments are bringing people into our countries. They are being pushed out by war, famine, poverty, oppression and discrimination because their group in society has been on the wrong side of the government or not on the winning side in a war. We must appreciate that more fully.

Of course the majority of them are men travelling on their own. These are people who must risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean or perhaps the Sahara. Of course it is going to be the case that most of them are men. They are the ones who are sent by their families, who save up the money to allow them to make the journey. In many cases they have families back home - wives, children and elderly relatives - that they would like to be able to follow them in a few years' time, after they have gained status, got a job and made some money. We should know from our own experience, from Irish men going to Scotland as labourers and from Irish people crossing the Atlantic to live in America, that it was a very similar process that we followed.

The EU migration pact itself allows us to do some of the things that we need to do to better secure the outer borders of the European Union. If people cannot enter Europe illegally or irregularly, it is going to be much harder for them to come here. That is a good thing. It will allow the 27 states to work together to combat people trafficking and those terrible criminal gangs that take money off people to put them in coffin ships and do not care whether they get to Europe or not as long as they get their money. It also allows us to work better on returns. People often ask me when somebody's asylum application has failed – most do fail – why they do not get sent home, as if it was that easy, as if they could be dropped out of an aeroplane. We cannot send people home who do not have documents. They need to get a passport from the country we are going to send them to. We cannot send them home unless that country has a returns agreement with Ireland and is willing to take them. We are in a much better position to negotiate returns agreements with countries that are relatively safe if we do that as a European Union of 27 member states. We have much more negotiating power than Ireland would have going to these countries on our own and asking if we could have a returns agreement with them. The European Union has leverage, big budgets and trade agreements. We have a much better chance of getting a return agreement with countries of origin as part of the European Union. Another reason is returns to other parts of Europe. We know that as many as one third of asylum seekers who arrive in Ireland have already applied for status or have some sort of status in another EU country. There is no requirement for those countries to take them back. We can ask but there is no requirement for that to be the case. The EU migration pact can help change that and make it easier for returns to happen.

There is also the possibility – it is something that must be considered – of the European Union coming to agreements with transit countries that people pass through on the way to Europe. They are not from there, but they pass through there on the way to Europe and they could process their applications there rather than here. That approach is very different from the Rwanda policy.

The final point I will make is that there are two big gaps in the EU's migration policy. The first is that we do not allow people to apply from where they are. Fewer people would come to Europe illegally if there was a means by which they could apply for asylum in their home countries, just like they apply for work permits or visas. Second, we need some form of green card system. We need more unskilled labour in the European Union. We do not just need people who have qualifications, we need people who have none, and there is not a proper system for those people to come to Europe legally.

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