Rónán Mullen (Independent)

I trust parties will consider their position in respect of this issue. I refer to the quarterly report of the ESRI. One awaits its quarterly reports in the way in which one anticipates a ghost story. Today's headline that 120,000 people will leave the country by the end of 2011 is stirring and disturbing. In the coming months our motto should be to bring those people back home as soon as possible. There are positives. A total of 1.9 million are working, 500,000 more than at the beginning of the Celtic tiger period, but only by being willing to make the hard choices in the coming months and keep to the programme on which we have embarked will we have any hope of bringing them home. We have to focus, therefore, on competitiveness, bringing down the cost of doing business and efficiencies in the semi-State sector. When we have debates in the coming months on the hard choices that must be made, let us think of the people we want to bring back home as soon as possible because if we are sincere about doing this, we will be ready to make the hard choices.

I commend the Irish Missionary Union which, among others, has brought to our attention the plight of asylum seekers in Mosney, County Meath. When one thinks of people being forced to relocate against their will without consultation or consideration of their individual needs from a place in which they have been based for the past five years, one thinks of the gulags and China preparing for the Olympic Games.