Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to pay tribute to the Minister for Justice and Equality for the speech he delivered here this evening which was very balanced, reasonable and constructive. It should be given some publicity. This House does not get much publicity in terms of press coverage. One can get publicity by saying the wrong thing but frequently one cannot get publicity by saying the right thing. The balance the Minister brought to his contribution was very important.

We face a situation in which there are people who are very obviously abusing xenophobia, the fear of immigration and of foreigners, for political purposes. One does not have to search the Internet for very long to see its seeds. While I do not want to give excessive publicity to it because it is sad enough in its own way, to see someone going into a halal shop and trying to provoke an incident with a decent shop assistant is disturbing. Do these people ever think about the fact that if they went into a kosher shop and had a similar incident with a Jewish shop assistant, nothing other than complete condemnation would be appropriate?

I agree with almost all of the analysis that I have heard here this evening. The real problem, which the Minister and Minister of State must get to grips with, is the delay problem. I know that the Minister and Minister of State cannot wave a magic wand. When I was Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform one of the things that depressed me slightly was that applications for citizenship took so long. The Department used to issue letters to applicants for citizenship saying that there was a three-year delay. The applicants were told not to call or write to the Department but to just accept that there was a three-year wait. I am sure that kind of correspondence is not issued now; I certainly hope it is not. A lot of the problems relating to direct provision including educational, family and social issues, would be hugely reduced if the decision-making process was faster.

The other issue, which is to some extent outside the remit of Ministers and the Government, is the interaction of the Courts Service with the asylum process.Members of the Judiciary are trying to expedite the determination of issues which come before the courts, but the number of cases coming to the courts should be greatly reduced by a more robust decision-making process. We may have to employ many more people in the processing of these asylum or protection applications to get on top of the issue, though that is a gloomy thought.

Before I was appointed Minister in 2002, having been Attorney General since 1999, my predecessor, John O'Donoghue, was struggling to deal with an unprecedented wave of asylum seekers. Up until the 1960s, people only wanted to get out of Ireland, and emigration was a constant theme. Nobody ever mentioned the problem of people coming to our shores. It was a reversal of realities in many respects. Having realised the extent of our incapacity to deal with the size of the problem due to our inexperience and lack of preparedness, we established the Irish-born child scheme to give residency rights to between 10,000 and 15,000 people with whom we simply could not deal. We gave them a pathway of integration into our society, a pathway to citizenship and a means of getting into employment. People forget about that, but that is what was done at the time.

I often hear the things the Minister has said about direct provision. Senator Ó Donnghaile said the system is broken. The system is not perfect and has faults but something like it will always exist, whether in State-provided buildings or delivered by State employees. The crucial thing is to ensure it is of good quality and that the duration of people's stays is limited.

There was a recent hullabaloo in Bray when it was proposed to deport a child who had been here for six years, about which his classmates and others protested. The old hoary chestnut of the referendum on changing the basis of entitlement to citizenship was resurrected in people's minds as an obstacle to doing justice in that particular case. I presume the Minister did that case justice on an administrative basis, and that the Constitution caused him no problems in that regard. People constantly say that referendum was racist, but it was no such thing. The 2002-07 Government made up of the Progressive Democrats and Fianna Fáil, of which I was a part, signalled on the very first day that we would have to deal with the issue that arose in that referendum. We could see European case law decisions such as those in the Chen, Zambrano, Ibrahim and Teixeira cases coming down the tracks. Those decisions would make it impossible for Ireland to have a well-regulated immigration system if it was the only country in the European Union which granted absolute jus solirights to people who gave birth to children not only within this State but also in Northern Ireland. The Minister has said that language on both sides must be moderate, on which I wholly agree with him. I never want to hear the suggestion that that was a racist referendum in this House again, because it was not. It was a sensible referendum which was supported by the major parties and the vast majority of Irish people. There was nothing racist about it.