Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and appreciate the opportunity to speak on this issue. As with most Senators, I have family members abroad. Most Members will recall the dark days of the 1980s when contact was made via long distance telephone calls and we welcomed our emigrants home at Christmas time. It is often said that the cameras are always rolling in Dublin Airport at Christmas time when emigrants are returning but they rarely capture the images of heartbreak as people leave on flights to Britain or the United States in the new year.I am fully conversant with that situation and know exactly what it is like to have an empty chair at the table. It is a difficult reality that almost every family in Ireland has been through at one stage or another. I have a brother living in Canada and a sister in London.

We now find ourselves between Trump and Brexit. Trump's executive orders are fundamentally xenophobic and patently racist. On the other hand, we have a Brexit debate which is centred around the issue of immigration. We have an international, historic and moral obligation to tell the world the story of the Irish people. As we approach St. Patrick's Day and enter the most powerful rooms in the world, with Ministers travelling around the world, we need to reiterate the fact that Ireland knows better than anybody about emigration. We had a country of coffin ships with people seeking refuge as they fled conflict. Our country knows exactly what the suppression of rights is all about.

At this historic moment in time, the first St. Patrick's Day since Brexit and Trump, we have a moral and historic obligation to stand for something that is more profound than our own diaspora. Senator Lawless and myself have been working with the Migrant Rights Centre to correlate two issues: the 50,000 undocumented Irish in the United States; and the 26,000 undocumented workers here. Both issues are the very same - there is absolutely no difference between them. We who have been working on that project stand in solidarity with those who feel fearful at this time of great uncertainty.

Almost 50 years ago, in April 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York, Martin Luther King made his anti-Vietnam war speech. He said: "Yes, we must stand and we must speak." On St. Patrick's Day in that iconic venue there will be an event called "Irish Stand" at 7.30 p.m. that evening, featuring writers, actors and activists. The gathering will include people from the Waking the Feminist movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as Colum McCann, Richard Schiff, Shaun King, Maeve Higgins and myself. I am calling on the Irish community in New York and elsewhere across America to support it.

At the moment it is not good enough for us to speak only about our own diaspora because people across the world are facing into this new political reality. They are fearful, but they need to know that there is a country which lies between the great traditional powers of Britain and America whose people have a story to tell. It is deeper than just having a St. Patrick's Day parade. It is about the human condition, interconnectivity and realising that our forebears had to flee this land, while others are doing the very same today. On St. Patrick's Day it is our historic and moral responsibility to take that stand. I want everybody in this House to realise that there are people willing, able and ready to do so.