Pauline Tully (Sinn Fein)

This morning, I was contacted by a school in Kilnaleck, a small village in my locality in County Cavan. Four families have been living there for the past 18 months. All four families have applied for international protection. They have been living in apartments in that village. Their children attend the local school. The parents are on the parents association. They support the school in everything it does. The children play football with the local GAA club and the parents go to matches. They are from all different countries in Africa and different parts. They work locally. Each of the families was yesterday hand-delivered a letter and told they would be moved from that accommodation next Wednesday. The letter was dated 4 November. They were only handed it yesterday. They are devastated. The children's friends in the school are devastated. The school, the employers and everyone else are devastated. They spent 18 months living in that village. They have become well integrated. Suddenly, they are uprooted with, for some reason, only a week's notice

I was informed last June that a contract was going to finish with that centre. I found out while inquiring about something else. These families were not informed. Some of them, possibly all of them, are Muslim but the children took part in the nativity play in the school last year. The families went to see it. This is an indication of how welcoming the people are in our town and local area. It is also an indication of what is wrong with the system. It highlights what is wrong with the system.

There is an international right to claim asylum, but we need a fast and efficient system for people when they come into the country. These families have been waiting for at least 18 months. I am not sure if they were in another location in Ireland and have been here even longer than that, but they have been here for at least 18 months. They should have an indication now as to whether they have leave to remain or not. If they do not, I understand they must be deported. What is happening now is that people are not being told, sometimes for years on end, whether they have leave to remain. They then get a deportation order when they have already integrated into a community where they are working and where their children are attending school. It is not fair. It is not humane. That is not the way we should treat people. It lacks humanity in every way.

The apartments those four families were living in were of good quality but where families or individuals seeking asylum are housed is determined by the private sector, and has been for the past number of years. It is not about the area, whether it can accommodate people or whether good housing, health systems or school places are available. It is based on whether a private operator has space and is willing to offer it. We have heard of some very dodgy people making millions of euro in taxpayers' money by housing IPAS and Ukrainian applicants. Some of the accommodation is less than good. That is not good enough.

We also need to address racism. We can never condone racism in any shape or form. We have been far too slow to act. We had riots in this city two years ago and people are only now being brought to court. Not even all of them have been. We saw a situation in England where there were riots and they were clamped down on straight away. Individuals were arrested and processed. There is a lot of false and misleading information floating around and that needs to be addressed. I hear from people that Ireland has changed. That is rubbish. We need to let people know. Some 85% of the people in this country were born here. Only 15% of the population have come here from other countries. The vast majority of them are coming here to work in our health services, the hospitality sector and our IT services. A proportion also come here to study.

I meet people of different nationalities and colours in my office all the time. They come in to talk to me. They are all human beings. They are all here trying to better their own lives and the lives of their families. The same is true of the Irish people who left this country and went elsewhere. Some people left Ireland for political reasons. Some were exiled. Many left after the Famine or the genocide that was created here in the 1840s. The vast majority of people who left here over the last century did so for economic reasons. They did not always go to other countries in the right way. Some went as illegal immigrants, and some are still illegal immigrants in other countries, and yet contributed to those countries in their own way. They went there to better their lives and those of their families. If we were to take all the immigrants out of this country, we would still have a housing problem and a problem in our health service because successive Governments have failed to address those problems. The Government is happy to sit back and let people blame immigrants for the problems. The people coming into this country are not causing any of the problems. They are helping our country. They are building our country and making it a better place. They need to be welcomed. We must take every measure we can to ensure that is happening. We must stamp out racism and unfair practices.