Seanad debates
Thursday, 3 July 2003
Immigration Bill 2002 [Seanad Bill amended by the Dáil] : Report and Final Stages.
Anybody who approaches this legislation from the moral high ground that anything which is restrictive of the right to abuse our asylum law is somehow draconian, repressive, ungiving and mean-minded should think again. If one considers the enormous amount of resources involved and bears in mind that it is the duty of the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform and the Houses of the Oireachtas to have in place a workable law which distinguishes between those who are entitled and those who are not and deals efficiently with that distinction in order that it has factual consequences, the moral choice is to do what I am proposing in this House and have proposed in the other House, that is, to have a workable, up-to-date, modern, common sense system which separates the wheat from the chaff, if I may use that phrase, distinguishes between the abusive and genuine application, brings the genuine applicant to the top of the queue and carefully and fairly rejects the non-genuine applicant. That is all I am doing.
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