Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I was present at the meeting of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality yesterday where we heard from the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service and the Refugee Applications Commissioner. It was clear that these people and the officials from the Department of Justice and Equality are very professional people but it occurred to me at that meeting that Ireland's performance on this issue could be a model of efficiency and at the same time, be utterly underwhelming from a perspective of social justice and doing justice in this very difficult situation. It could even be a bit morally bankrupt.

Why do I say that? I say that because we are taking part in an EU initiative that by its very title, if one looks at the EU decision, is about provisional measures in the area of international protection for the benefit of Italy and Greece. Quite understandably, there is a need to relocate people from Italy and Greece so that the matter can be processed in an orderly way. However, it seems there has been a complete failure of imagination on Ireland's part given that we are in a situation where we opt in to measures as opposed to being bound by them. It has been a complete failure of imagination on our part in terms of what our obligations are, first and foremost. There has been a complete failure to factor in thinking about the persecuted minorities - Christians and other minorities in the Middle East - in terms of our thinking about the best response at this point in time.

The reason I say that is because behind the 160,000 people who will be taken in over the next couple of years, there are millions more waiting to get into the EU and who will indeed seek to get into the EU but the EU will only be able to take so many. As the room fills, there will be very little room left for people who perhaps do not have the means to cross Europe. They might not have been able to leave refugee camps in Turkey because they might have been frightened to go into refugee camps in the first place, as has been reported about some of the Christian minorities. They might be Yazidis who face particular persecution and torment - not just Christian minorities in the Middle East but others such as Turkmen and some Shia Muslim minorities. There seems to be no thinking on the part of our Government about whether there should be a particular channel for those people in the context of the limited response that Ireland can make.

The Minister for Justice and Equality attended a meeting in Paris on our behalf on 8 September 2015. It was a conference on victims of ethnic and religious violence in the Middle East. As far as I am aware, we heard nothing from the Government either about what she said or what was decided at that conference. As far as I am aware, there was little to no media coverage in Ireland about that. We are not hearing at all from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade about this issue. The entire approach seems to be that the Department of Justice and Equality is heading up a response about how we take in our share but should we not be interested in the question of how we identify our share when there are perhaps people who will be forgotten in all of this and who, as I have said, were terrified to go into camps because they would be persecuted or were not in the position to travel? It is not that I do not feel sympathy for young Muslim men and Muslim families who have left camps and arrived on our shores and it is not that I do not feel sympathy for the EU bureaucracy that must face this problem. However, it is not necessarily the right solution just to start with those people and say these are the people we are going to integrate.

We are told that it will be Italy and Greece who will determine who is sent to each country for processing. If there are security concerns and if Ireland is in a position to identify that a particular person is a security risk, we were informed to a limited degree yesterday that this could be made known to Greece and Italy and that might or might not be taken into account. There is a real missed opportunity here in terms of doing justice and there has been a real shallowness of thinking. We should have a generous but structured policy of bringing people into our country who are fleeing persecution or war - indeed economic migrants as well - but there should be a particular vigilance about those who directly face persecution because of their ethnicity or religion. Just as I would disagree with the Christians-only approach as expressed by the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, the response of the Minister for Defence a couple of weeks was just as inadequate when he echoed Donald Tusk when he said that religion has nothing to do with it. That is too shallow an analysis. If you are a member of a minority religious group - if you are a Christian from Mosul - you do not have a future in Iraq and your community probably does not have a future when all this settles down where we know there will be zones for Shia and Sunni Muslims. Everybody has equal human dignity but some people are at particular risk because of who and what they are. As far as I can see, the Irish Government is not interested in examining that question in the context of its response and I think that is appalling.