Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to support this motion for Ireland to opt in to the negotiating mandate on the EU-UK youth experience scheme. It is worth noting that the consequences of the anti-immigrant sentiment that drove the right wing campaign in the UK against the EU are now becoming apparent. It should be a salutary warning to people who want to go down the road of anti-immigration that it comes back to bite you in all sorts of ways. From an economic point of view, the UK has not thrived as a result of the Brexit decision. David Ricardo an economist of pro-market inclination and Karl Marx, a classical 19th-century economist, both agreed that all wealth derives from human labour. Something that the anti-immigrant brigade does not seem to understand is that human beings are needed to make a society and an economy prosper. Part of that is the experience of travelling abroad, learning from other people, interacting with different cultures, different types of societies and different economic models. People learn from these experiences and everybody is enriched by them. Thankfully, there is some recognition here that young people in Britain are losing out as a result of not having that freedom to move around Europe to work, study and to interact with other cultures and societies. There is evidence that the UK has benefited nothing and has almost certainly lost out as a result of adopting this anti-immigrant position. When they get into this anti-immigrant mentality, people should consider whether they really want such a situation. These things have knock-on consequences. Other countries in Europe are threatening to go down the road of this anti-immigrant politics. It can have a domino effect where eventually it could come back to bite us as well, in terms of the ability of our young people to travel. As has been said, we have a long history and tradition of our people going all over the world to work, study or simply to travel and meet other peoples, cultures and societies. Do we really want our young people to face that anti-immigrant sentiment that certain political forces are trying to whip up? It will happen if we give succour to this.

Some examples are a little bit of a warning on another level to us. In recent years, I have been amazed by the number of young people who are going to study in the Netherlands. At one level, it is a very good thing that young people do so. However, I am also wondering why they are going to the Netherlands to study. The reason they give is that there are no fees for a master's degree in the Netherlands. Here, a master's degree costs €6,000 per year. In the Netherlands students can also find affordable accommodation. As well as wanting our young people and young people generally to have the right to travel, work and study abroad, we might also want to be encouraging people to stay here or even people to come here to work and study and so on, when we consider the shortages in all sorts of areas such as the health service and education. However, we are putting barriers in their way because we have excessive fees for master's degrees and postgraduate studies.

These are barriers to people moving around and, ultimately, they are having a negative impact on our ability to function as an economy and society. For example, a lot of our young artists go to Britain because the conditions for performers, actors, directors and so on are better in Britain than they are here. As the Equity union has pointed out again and again, the UK has a decent agreement between Equity and film and other arts producers, so our talent are leaving because they are on substandard, often crappy, precarious contracts here. We should think about making Ireland a bit more attractive for our young people as well.

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