Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

First, I congratulate the Minister on his elevation to the leadership of the Green Party and I wish him well with that. We are here to make statements on migration. When I see it and read it, it gives me the chills because I have a fear of any further stoking of the hate and the activities that we have seen in our country in the last year and a half especially, which have just been appalling. They are reminiscent of scenes from television from the North in my childhood. It really is quite appalling that people are camping en masse outside facilities that have the most basic of circumstances to prevent people from coming to live there. Why do they need to go to live there? The vast majority are coming from war-torn countries and dreadful situations that fall off the news headlines very quickly. I marvel on a daily basis with sadness about how far down the newsfeed the war in Ukraine has gone. The strike on a hospital this week elevated its status again, as did the NATO meeting, but the fact is that on a daily basis, people in Ukraine are living with fear and in a situation in which their lives are in peril.

One of the things that is missing from much of the debate here is all we do to assist countries to mitigate the need for people to leave their homes. I have worked in Rwanda and India and I have seen on the ground the work that is funded by Irish Aid and the incredible interventions in communities, the support of women and indigenous businesses. We support much work to bring people to a place where they are sustainable and where they have little businesses. We do not speak about all that we do enough. By doing things like that, we show that we have a sense of responsibility as to where people are coming from. We act in the places where people are coming from. I appreciate that is a matter for the Department of Foreign Affairs but it is important that we always emphasise the fact that there is conflict, war, climate change and drivers of poverty that make people want to move to Europe and Ireland.

We have an incredible success story. We have high levels of satisfaction, full employment, and huge vacancies, so we need more people to come and work here. I can therefore see why people want to come for economic reasons to our country. It is for that purpose that we have a tailor-made application process for work permits, and it is right that we emphasise that we oblige people to come through that process. We must ensure that if they are coming here to work and if they want to work, we can welcome them with open arms. In fact, our entire health system would grind to a halt if we did not have inward migration in that area. We therefore do have a proper process and we also have an asylum process. In that sense, Senator McDowell is right. We need to emphasise them both as being distinct and separate. For economic migrants, there is a facility to come lawfully to our country. It is from that perspective that, while I have some reservations about this two-tier strategy, at the same time, I agree that we need to assess people quickly. If they come from safe countries, there is a process by which their economic migration can be supported through work permits and applications of that type. Yet, when they come for asylum, they need to be supported and respected.

I have to say, I absolutely despise this attitude that single men are dangerous. I really do. I find it shocking and it happens all of the time. There is a categorisation of men as dangerous. In the last week or two, the headlines have been taken up by an Irish man who beat a woman unconscious and an Irish man who raped two women in a taxi. There is the latest appalling revelation of a man who raped a seven-year-old child on the occasion of her mother's funeral. An Irish man did that. I have worked for nearly two years in the criminal courts and the vast majority of people who were up on charges and who were convicted were Irish men and women. Very few of them - a tiny proportion - are those who have immigrated to our country. It is in the main the Irish people who keep the courts going. Therefore, this idea that we could classify somebody as dangerous because they are from a foreign country is a really appalling indictment of those who speak those words. It really is appalling. I find it really terrible.

When you speak to people who come here for asylum and who come here looking for assistance and support, they say they want to work and that they want to earn a living. They are anxious to get to some semblance of a normal life. If you have come from Gaza, Syria or places like that, the idea of getting into a normal life is really appealing. That is the desire of anyone I have spoken to. That is where they want to go. They do not want to be at the mercy of the State. I hear the Minister when he says that we have given the larger amount of €113 per week, but God help us, that does not go very far. That is really a quite meagre amount to try to live on and get some sort of decent standard.

This is an opportunity to praise some of the people we see throughout our communities. I am in many of these For All groups where I am daily heartened by the asks. They say they need somebody to come and give English lessons, they need a buggy, or that somebody is going for an interview and they need a suit, etc. The instant responses to these requests are a beautiful narrative of community in action and welcome in action but it does not hit the headlines. We will never read about it. We will see the horrific pictures of the thugs in Newtownmountkennedy and other places but we do not see the fantastic work that is done in all these For All groups. I refer to the welcome they give, the ongoing support, the summer camps that are being run at the moment for children and how they bring children out for day trips. We do not see half enough of that. That is the spirit of our country and is reflective of the vast majority of our population. That is the true reflection of our attitude to migration.

I appreciate the need to move the tents. At the time, we saw a multi-agency response and we need to see that sort of a multi-agency response on an ongoing basis. We need to see it from the perspective of the supply of services by making sure that doctors and services go to where groups are living and being accommodated. There are some issues I wish to raise. There is a family I know of who is in a refuge I have been working with. They received their refugee status recently but on the same day on which they got their refugee status, they got a notification that they could no longer live in the IPAS centre they were in. Therefore, there was some great news but then bad news was delivered. Regarding the movement of people, I can understand wanting to consolidate the provision of services to larger contracts with a smaller number, such as what has happened in Clare. Yet, throughout this, I have been disappointed in our emergency response.We have had children move, settle into a school, have a uniform and a community come around them, having come from conflict, and then suddenly be upped and moved after growing roots. I am not sure that we are doing that as well as we could. I appreciate that we are responding to something we cannot predict. While we cannot say how many are going to come, in line with the pact and the things the Minister has been saying, we can be and should be future planning. We cannot have a community the size of Ennis sitting idly by and waiting for people to come into our country. Some of the narrative of criticism is ridiculous and does not reflect the reality that we cannot predict how many people are going to arrive here tomorrow. Certainly, it may be that there are occasions when there are vacant premises that are there and ready to go to be reception centres.

I will finish by stating it is important to highlight everything that is good. It is very easy to highlight everything that is bad but we need to highlight everything that is good in the fantastic communities around our country.