Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach for welcoming to the House Dr. Ashwani Kumar, a former Minister for justice from India and a member of the Indian Parliament who is here as my guest along with Professor Jane Ohlmeyer of Trinity College. It is an honour to have both of them here, particularly at a time when Trinity is welcoming many students from India and other countries worldwide.

In that context, I ask the Leader for a debate on Ireland expressing a welcome to a particular group we are currently seeing in the news, that is, the group of unaccompanied minors who are languishing in the detention centre in Calais, which today is being dismantled by the French authorities. Several hundred young people who are unaccompanied minors are being kept on-site in Calais in order to be processed, many of them to go to the UK. It would be a good sign and an important gesture of goodwill if the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality and the Government were to express a welcome and to offer a hand of friendship to a small number, to several hundred young, unaccompanied and vulnerable asylum seekers who are currently in a legal limbo and who are not been transported elsewhere in France but who are awaiting processing in Calais. We should be offering a refuge to them in Ireland.

At a time when there is talk of the Seanad being consigned to the museum, it is unfortunate that we would hear such dated and archaic language in this House as that of "housewives" uttered by Senator Leyden earlier. It is not a comment that has any time or place in modern Irish society.