Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The actual figure of patients without a bed in University Hospital Limerick, UHL, this morning is 111. It was 97 yesterday. I appreciate the Deputy Leader's support for an independent investigation but we need action today. We need the Minister for Health, Deputy Donnelly, to act. We have been talking about this for six years and each year it gets worse. Fine Gael has been in power for 11 years and Fianna Fáil, effectively, for six years and still it goes on and gets worse, and still, we wait for intervention. It is not what I wanted to speak about but I needed to make that point.

I spoke this week at the Council of Europe on the European Pact on Migration and Asylum. My party is very concerned about this proposed pact and the impact on human rights. I want to highlight something that has been going on for years that everyone knows about but, unfortunately, that conservative political groups such as the European People's Party and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, ALDE, have nothing to do with. They do not want to act on it. I refer to the disgraceful arrangement between the European Union and the Libyan coastguard.

I will give Members a couple of quotes from a direct report on the issue of people trapped in those horrific prisons. I will read the most important quotes. The camp is called Al Mabani in Tripoli. The author of the report wrote, "Beatings can be doled out for transgressions as minor as whispering to other migrants, speaking in a native tongue or laughing."

The author went on to recount later speaking to a witness. He wrote:

... a thirty-six-year-old migrant from the Ivory Coast, who was held at Al Mabani with her 14-year-old daughter for two months, told me that women were frequently taken from her cell to be raped by the guards. 'The women would come back in tears,' [she said]. One day after two women escaped from Al Mabani, guards grabbed ... [this lady], took her to a nearby office, and beat her for reasons that remain unclear.

This is not news. The European Union knows about this. I call for the disgraceful relationship to be ended. The European people's Party and ALDE are propping it up. How much longer are we going to see migrants beaten, raped and tortured? The European Union not only turns a blind eye but gives financial support to the Libyan coastguard, which is implementing that policy.

We need state-led rescue missions to stop the drownings in the Mediterranean. Instead, what we have are bandits from the Libyan coastguard financed by the European Union. We hear about European Union values. Where are those values? Unlike the European People's Party, when are MEPs from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael going to stand up for people's rights in Europe as opposed to carrying on with this disgraceful silence in the face of the most shameful of human rights abuses?