Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I feel terrible because we did not get to tease out some really important points on the last amendment.

This amendment again relates to the protection of smuggled persons. These two issues are constantly entwined because we are coming to the protection of the humanitarian worker and the protection of the smuggled person. The purpose is to ensure that we do not have wrongful prosecution - a prosecution which creates a chilling effect on the humanitarian actor or creates a further damage or harm to the smuggled person, who, as the Minister of State described in his speech, will in many cases have experienced exceptional difficulties and will be extremely vulnerable.

I have proposed a blanket safety clause in amendments Nos. 12 and 13. For both the smuggled person and the humanitarian actor, we need to err on the side of protection for different, but equally important, reasons. While this is not quite here, it is between the lines. When we talk about the damage done by smugglers and the importance of prosecuting them, we must remember that smuggling is happening because some people are desperate to travel and we do not have safe passage routes. I have not tabled amendments because I recognise that is a wider piece. However, I would like to hear a response. We really need to engage on that question of improving our safe passage routes.

Smugglers are not the cause of smuggling; desperation is the cause of smuggling. It is then exploited by smugglers for profit. The core driver is that many people are in extremely terrible situations. In some cases, they are seeking family reunification but are excluded by narrow family reunification laws. In some cases, they are fleeing direct conflict. In some cases, they would seek asylum but physically cannot get to the place where they need to be in order to seek asylum. Those are the people who in many cases are being smuggled. It is important that this legislation does not put a further burden on those people because the responsibility for them being in that situation lies partly with the smugglers, but it also lies partly with states and the failure to provide safe passage routes.