Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)

Déarfaidh mé cúpla focal san am atá agam. There is no doubt that the Government has mishandled migration, particularly international protection. In doing so, it has ignored and indeed antagonised communities and driven a wedge between people. Real damage has been done on the ground and it is going to take a long time to repair. It will not be the Government picking up the pieces; it will be community workers, activists and ordinary people who do this day in day out. People on the ground will have to deal with the damage and the level of mistrust in this Government that has been caused over the while. There is no doubt that there are bad actors exploiting all of that.

However, the Government's role in this is not a good one. We have seen unsustainable numbers of people applying for asylum over the past three years. The Minister's figures showing that 80% are rejected in the first instance is an example of that. However, this has been obvious to everyone for the past number of years. Hotels have been taken over, town planning systems have been cast aside and instead of the Government in the past saying that this was unsustainable and instead of actually fixing the system by speeding up the processes and ensuring that deportations were enforced where they were required, what we had was commentary saying that this was the new normal.

We need to have a serious conversation about the actual causes that led to these levels of migration. There is no appetite for that conversation within this Government or indeed across Europe. We saw that with the disastrous migration pact to which the Government has signed us up. It totally ignored the root causes. If European states were serious about reducing the number of arrivals, they would stop selling arms to dictators and oppressive regimes. They would review all EU trade deals and practices that disadvantage poor countries and keep them poor and they would tackle the illicit financial flows to stop hundreds of billions of euro flowing out of poor countries and into European banks. However, that is not the conversation they want to have. For our part, we opposed the migration pact because we knew it undermined sovereignty. It allows European governments and this Government to pretend that they are doing something.

I said at the start that the Government has mishandled the issue of migration. My own county of Donegal is a good example of that. Donegal captures the failures of this Government on this issue probably better than any other. It is the most deprived county on the island of Ireland. It has the highest unemployment rate, the highest levels of deprivation and the least disposable income in the State yet it has the highest levels of IPAs and of those seeking temporary protection for Ukrainian international applicants than anywhere else in the State. It has the highest number of people benefiting from the accommodation recognition payment, ARP, system. How does a system like this come to pass? How does one of the poorest and most neglected counties in the State end up with the highest concentration of people who themselves are under serious pressure? It is because the Government does not have a plan. This Government and the past Government in which Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil were involved, allowed for speculation and profit to be the main driver in this. Sinn Féin made it clear that the location of these centres should not be in disadvantaged areas that do not have adequate resources. That applies equally for Coolock and Cloughaneely. We have had a developer-led approach looking for higher profits by getting sites in disadvantaged and rural areas.

It is a year and a half ago since I stood here and proposed amendments to the Government in relation to the ARP scheme. At the time, I told the Government it was putting pressure on the rental sector. I said it was completely unfair for the State to pay the rent of somebody who was working in the factory while the person who was working beside them in the same factory, earning the same wages, had to pay their own rent. It is completely unfair. Yet, the Government not only renewed it that time but renewed it again since. That system is unfair. Since that time, 16 months ago, there has been an explosion of ARP accommodation in my own county of Donegal. It has gone up by three times. It went from 600 units to more than 2,000 today. It is no wonder that people come knocking at my door or go to other TDs saying they cannot find rental accommodation. Yet, 2,000 properties have been found for Ukrainians who need accommodation and they are being paid for by the State. There is a resentment in relation to that. That is not a situation that was fostered by Ukrainians. It is the Government who designed this scheme, which is wrong.

There has been no considered management of migration that takes into account the ability or the capacity of communities to integrate those who make their homes here. Migration must be managed in the best interests of the people of Ireland. It needs to take into account the needs of workers in key sectors such as health and the challenges in capacity, housing and other public services and the humanitarian response to those fleeing war and persecution.

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