Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I would not dream of doing so, especially this morning. It would be very simple to draft legislation which made clear what procedures a commercial carrier had to operate in good faith before he or she brought anyone into the State. The legislation would state he or she was under a legal obligation to ensure certain things. The Bill before the House criminalises people unnecessarily.

With the permission of the Chair, I will quote a paragraph from a document signed by Amnesty International, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and the Irish Refugee Council:

Research for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees has shown that the vast majority of asylum seekers now enter Europe in an irregular fashion and more than likely with the assistance of traffickers and smugglers. The main nationalities who are trafficked and smuggled are those who go on to gain refugee status.

We are driving people who, it is ultimately discovered, have legitimate claims to refugee status into the hands of smugglers and traffickers. I do not know what that is purported to achieve.

This measure forms part of the Schengen Agreement, but as is our entitlement, we operate the agreement selectively. When it suits us, the open travel arrangement between Ireland and the United Kingdom is used as a great excuse to close down free movement between Ireland and the rest of the European Union. It is an affront to our membership of the European Union that we, as the most passionate Europeans, as we describe ourselves, retain passport restrictions more consistent with the slightly xenophobic and isolationist mentality across the water in Britain than with ours. We were told that our non-accession to the entire Schengen accord related to problems with the common travel area. It is clear that we will now never agree to any form of passport free status within the European Union because we have got ourselves into a frenzy of concern about asylum seekers.