Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Ó Ríordáin, to the House. I recall that when he came here not long after he had been appointed, he said that one of his priorities was to address this ongoing issue which has been, in a sense, a running sore in our immigration policy for almost 20 years.

At the beginning of the cycle of the Celtic tiger we began to attract more and more people into this country to the point where we had to set up some system to accommodate them. I have never been able to grasp the reasons people have been left in direct provision for so long. My understanding from people who know more about it than I do, is that it has a lot to do with our legal system, which allows people to go to the courts on a regular basis. If they have their initial appeal turned down, they can go again. In a way it may be a lawyer's paradise. I gather that is one of the issues. I am not sure whether anything can be done about that in legal terms to prevent people from exercising their right.

At the same time, as Senator Conway has said, we have ended up with people who have been in direct provision for so many years now, and it really must be a very difficult time for people. I saw one case recently reported in the newspaper where a very highly-qualified individual in Cork was not allowed to work. It must be very frustrating. I do not know whether the Minister of State is going to tackle this issue in his working group, other than giving them €19 or €20 a week. He did say there had been significant developments in two matters which he spoke about in the House in September. By the way, I compliment him for returning to the House within six months as he promised.

The operation of the independent working group set up last year seems to be what the Minister of State is going to hang a lot of his hopes on. It is to be welcomed. The working group set up three smaller, more focused working groups dealing with improvements to the living conditions in centres, aimed at showing greater respect for the dignity of persons in the system and improving their quality of life. I do not know how the Minister is going to do this under the present system. If asylum seekers are coming into this country they have to go through a particular process and I would like to think that, irrespective of the shortcomings in the system, they are at the very least afforded some dignity as human beings.

Reference was made to improved financial, educational and health supports for asylum applicants. Does this mean they are going to be given more money or will they be allowed to work during the period? There was also reference to the improvements to existing arrangements for the processing of asylum applications. That, to me, is the most relevant of the three arms of the focus groups. I am not in any way wishing to diminish the importance of the other two, but if people are not in the system so long that they become sterile or frustrated, or lose their dignity as people, I think that goes a long way to preventing that happening. I am not sure how this is going to be addressed. How is it that other countries - Senator Conway referred to Portugal - seem to be able to address it in a way that we are not? This is because of our legal system. Are there ways of addressing this by introducing more legislation that will mean the system is speeded up and becomes more efficient? After all, I am assuming - correct me if I am wrong - that the people who are coming in with asylum applications are doing so, as they see it, on the basis of justifiable cause, that they have left a country where they will be persecuted or killed, or their families will be threatened, if they are returned there. I assume that is why people seek asylum.

I have often wondered what happened to the Dublin convention which was set up with a great deal of fanfare at the time, going back to the late 1990s probably. The objective was that if asylum seekers arrived here they would be returned to the country within Europe which they had left to get here. I often wonder, and I am not singling out any particular race or ethnicity, but I understand that in the wider sense, I am not just talking about asylum seekers, but in terms of ethnic origin, there are a significant number of Nigerians in this country yet there are no direct air flights from Lagos to Dublin, so they would have had to come through some other country. I am not singling them out particularly but there are other countries from which people have come which have no direct air links, so how do they get here? The anecdotal evidence would suggest they came in through London. Others have flown in from Amsterdam. I am curious to know what has happened the Dublin convention. Is it gone? I gather it is still there, but it does not seem to be enforceable or to have been enforced. It would have gone a long way to addressing this issue of asylum seekers being left in a legal limbo for more years than any of us care to want.

Overall, I welcome the Minister of State's focus on this and wish him well in his efforts to get to the bottom of it because it is in everybody's interests, both of this country and in the interests of the asylum seekers themselves, and indeed future applicants, that there is a clear, transparent, efficient pathway to eventually establishing whether they can stay.