Seanad debates

Thursday, 19 December 2002

Immigration Bill, 2002: Committee Stage (Resumed).

 

The reason we have so many asylum seekers is we took five years to develop a means of processing applications for asylum. That is the fundamental problem. While the numbers are significant, they are not huge in proportion to the rest of Europe. It is interesting to examine them because, if all countries in the European Union have carrier liability and it has made no difference to the numbers of asylum seekers with which they must deal, and if those numbers are increasing at the same rate as ours, why are we implementing this legislation? We do so in order that we can say we are doing something about asylum seekers, because there is a constituency that does not like people with dark skins coming into the country. We would want to be very careful how we deal with this issue.

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