Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House today. At the heart of this, we do have to call a spade a spade, as Senator Garvey said. There is an essential difference between migration and seeking international protection. They are not the same thing. Just as there are nasty people on the right in Ireland who are stoking up false fears abouts migration, the general replacement of the Irish and the like on one hand, there are people who see themselves as on the left who deliberately confuse the concepts of migration with asylum-seeking and international protection-seeking and claim there is no essential difference between them.Senator Garvey here has said people have the right to come to Ireland to seek a better life. That is true up to a point, but it is untrue after that point. This State has a duty and a right and a moral obligation, especially in present circumstances, to have a coherent migration policy. That involves, for instance - the Minister has referred to it and so has Senator Garvey - looking to our own needs, looking to the construction industry and the fantastic work done by migrants in the health service. Such people are indispensable to our way of life at the moment and it is about recognising they are here lawfully and have come here lawfully and that the State has received them in accordance with a controlled policy.

I, as a former Minister for Justice, am fully aware of the difference between asylum-seeking on the one hand and migration policy, work permits and policies of that kind on the other. There is a fundamental distinction between migration and asylum-seeking. The 1951 convention on refugees and the protocol attached to it was never intended by the signatory parties at any point during the decades when it was originally put in place to be a mechanism for mass migration across the world. That is the plain, unvarnished truth. Since then a wholly different world has emerged where what was impossible in the 1950s for people who did not have means, which is to travel half way across the world and claim asylum in another country of their choice, is now possible. There are people for whom that is not easy, such as those coming across the Sahara, into north Africa, seeking to cross the Mediterranean and then filtering through France and the other EU countries, Italy, Greece and the like, and finally coming to places such as northern Europe. For those people, for whom that is a huge trek, it is not in many cases a question of fleeing persecution or war but simply what Senator Garvey said, namely, people seeking a better life.

There was a time, up to relatively recently, when the Georgian ambassador was almost a permanent fixture in this House. He impressed upon me the need for Ireland to have a fair system of migrancy so that Georgians who wanted to work in our construction industry, skilled people such as those Senator Garvey referred to - plumbers, bricklayers, plasterers and the like who could earn ten times in Ireland what they could if they were lucky to be employed in Georgia - could be facilitated since Ireland needed them and they wanted to come here. That is undoubtedly true. I put on record the health service simply could not function without migrants for even a day. I am not just talking about State-owned hospitals and the like. I am talking about carers, home carers and a whole load of different situations in which migration is absolutely essential to our way of life. We need to have a State policy which makes the distinction. There is migration for a better life, which is a perfectly reasonable aspiration for anyone anywhere in the world, be they Irish people fleeing famine in the 19th century or emigrants seeking employment from Ireland in the 20th and 21st centuries. The simple fact is that is one phenomenon that is not covered by the refugee conventions.

The second fact we must acknowledge is we are finding huge difficulty, which the Minister referred to in his remarks, accommodating people who under international law at the moment and EU law are entitled to reside here while their applications for international protection are examined. There are huge problems. The tent cities along the canal and all that bear witness to that. I totally support the Minister in one respect, namely, that the State should provide at least minimal decent accommodation for those kind of people. It is not an easy task to repurpose lands, buildings and the like to achieve that and there will be local opposition, most of which is based on considerations of fear and apprehension about the nature and future of their local communities if large numbers of people are accommodated in single centres in particular locations. I understand those fears, but I also understand the State must live up to its current international obligations. The Minister has spoken about the volume of international protection applicants being in the range of 20,000 to 30,000 per year in Ireland in the future, but the migration pact is a great illusion. We are not going to be in a position to turn them around in three months and send even a working majority of them home by deportation flights. I was a Minister. I tried to organise deportation flights. I know what is involved and know how difficult and how futile that kind of approach actually is.

We are also faced with the situation that the Minister’s colleague, the Minister for Justice, said she believes 80% of asylum applicants or international protection applicants in Ireland are coming here via the United Kingdom. We have to wise up and see why that is. Why are they coming here rather than remaining in the UK? Are they more likely to receive an understanding approach here than in the UK? Now that Keir Starmer and his party have been elected with such a huge majority in Westminster and are intent on achieving the entirely sensible goal of reversing the Rwanda policy, at least that, which is bound to be an obstacle to any deportation of any asylum seeker or international protection applicant in Ireland to the UK, will disappear. However, we must ask ourselves what it is about this island that 80% of the people coming here travelled through our neighbouring democracy. What is it about us that is bringing that situation about, especially when we cannot accommodate them? No matter what the Minister does he cannot provide non-tented facilities for these people.

We have to ask ourselves some fundamental questions. I will end on the most fundamental of those. The EU has, through its charter of fundamental rights and freedoms, pinned itself to the 1951 convention and to the proposition that remains a cornerstone of European law. The problem remains in Europe that we have to wise up to the fact those conventions are no longer fit for purpose in the world in which we live, a world of mass transit, of hugely sophisticated rights given to applicants in courts, massively legal openings for contesting decisions due to the massive delays and the like and the right of family reunification that has been extended so broadly. All these things suggest that in Europe they are not calling a spade a spade and that Ireland is, in consequence, failing to deal with a migration problem masked in large measure as an international protection-seeking problem.Unless Europe changes its fundamental policies, in my view we are going to fail to deal with what will be an increasingly socially divisive phenomenon.