Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin North Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

With regard to the amendment tabled by Senators Cullinane, Ó Clochartaigh and Reilly, as Senators will be aware, I have a personal commitment to reforming the direct provision system. Alongside my colleague, the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Fitzgerald, I established a working group on the protection process. The work of this group is ongoing and it will report back in the coming weeks with a suggested path of reforms. However, I cannot accept the amendment. Indeed, some of the matters referred to fall outside my remit in the Department. I appreciate that these are important issues and if the Senators want to outline their concerns in writing to me, I will ensure that they are brought to the attention of the Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald.

On a personal note, I thank those who were involved in the festival, which has become the first PolskaÉire Festival. It was intended to be a once-off occasion because it would centre around the soccer international but that changed over the course of the week of the events, which are still ongoing because there are events around the country and, indeed, the film festival in Smithfield this week has all of a sudden become the first Polish-Irish festival. There is a new plaque on O'Connell Street to Pawe Edmund Strzelecki, who did a massive amount of famine relief work here in the 1840s and is credited with saving the lives of 200,000 children in Ireland during that period. The plaque, a monument, if one likes, to the PolskaÉire Festival, will last for a long time, and great credit is due to the Irish-Polish Society for organising that.

We always have had people come to this country who have contributed to Ireland. One can go back to St. Patrick. One can look at the seven signatories to the Proclamation, two of whom were born outside Ireland and two others of whom were sons of migrants. It is a fantastic opportunity for us. As I have said this on quite a number of occasions, I feel sorry for the Polish representatives in the Gallery who have heard so many similar speeches of mine in the past ten days or so, but, if I might, I will continue along that vein. The country that I grew up in was a particularly boring, stale, mono-cultural one, a country that people wanted to leave. Many of us in this House will have friends and family living abroad who have found a country outside of Ireland that they decided to call home. I was taken by something an Italian Minister said at an EU event recently, that he wanted Italy to be the best place in the world for Italian-born people. That is something we have to do for ourselves, hope Ir eland might be the best place in which Irish people can live. However, from a situation where, in 1996, 0.5% of the population were born outside the State, now 12% were. It is a wonderfully enriching and exciting for us to have that shared experience. The thousands of years of history that have brought the Polish nation to this point is now our history too. While the Polish people go through a period of reflection on the 70 years since the end of the Second World War and we are going through our period of reflection, I am so excited about the new identity of being Polish-Irish. I said this on quite a few occasions that we are so used to the idea of being Irish-American but we have never necessarily come to the realisation that there is a whole new body of people in the country who are comfortable with the idea of being Hungarian-Irish, Czech-Irish, Moldovan-Irish or Polish-Irish.

We have started something wonderful with this conversation this week. We talked with young people about where they are with that internal friction between two identities and how they can celebrate it and move on from it. We have spoken about integration through sport, which, as Senator Hayden stated, is a fantastic avenue in which to connect and build bridges. We have used art and music. Basically, we have focused, not only on the constraints of a national identity but on what a national identity can do in terms of connecting with another human being.National identity is important, but one's humanity supersedes all of those elements.

I thank Senators for allowing us discuss the nature of integration. I agree we have problems and issues to overcome. People have mentioned the issue of direct provision and that is something we discussed at the joint committee earlier today. There are obviously issues to be discussed in regard to the protection system. Not everybody has the same mindset when it comes to the issue of migration and I would say that our political system does not give itself enough credit for its achievements. Look for example at what is happening across the water in the British general election and how immigration is front and centre of that debate. Look too at what is happening in France and Germany. The European Union is under a greater strain now, despite being the greatest political movement of the past 100 years and bringing people together with the common goal for a peaceful Europe. Our system, regardless of political party affiliations, has not been strangled by the issue of immigration and we should hold on to, cherish and build on that for the future.