Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

To clarify, this section does apply to rescue ships and it does apply to anybody doing any of those actions, and it does not only apply because we have chosen not to put in an exemption. In fact, this applies to everybody, and then they may have a defence. That is the problem. We will come across this in many places, whereby it applies to everybody and then they may have a defence. That is not the same as saying "This law will not target ...". This law affects anybody engaging in search and rescue.

When we talk about the people we want to defend, I want to be clear that the people about whom we are concerned are not solely those who engage in humanitarian rescue or those who engage in human rights activity. The people I am concerned about protecting are those people who are drowning in the Mediterranean Sea or those people who die on our borders, for example, those who died of hypothermia just last week on the borders of Europe.

People are dying in great numbers. There is a danger and a moral jeopardy. There is also a legal jeopardy in terms of our human rights obligations and Ireland and other EU countries not fulfilling those obligations. I want the traffickers prosecuted and I want criminal activities that manipulate and take advantage of vulnerable persons prosecuted, but I am looking at the balancing of jeopardy, and the jeopardy at the moment is situations. I will come to this again later, but this is why Ireland should be giving leadership. There are deaths constantly in the Mediterranean Sea.

I do not want a situation where somebody is producing a clearly terrible and fake nonsense piece of paper and saying, "Here are my papers", and somebody else who sees that the paper is terribly nervous of bringing that person to safety because it might be said that they had reasonable cause to know it is a badly photocopied document and is clearly a terrible ID. People are desperate and they are travelling with inappropriate documents, or documents that they are told are valid and that they genuinely believe are valid, but are not. We know that these are the realities of people's journey to safety and journey from desperate situations. This is the context.

Many of these cases would be avoided if there was a clear exemption. Because we do not have an exemption we have to go after so many of the aspects of this. We must assume that the people who are experiencing these laws are also going to be human rights workers and humanitarian workers. These people are good Samaritans.