Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance)

We will be opposing this proposal, although not for similar reasons to any mentioned in the House today. I reject the idea that this is all about our sovereignty. I want to start from the point of view of looking at why we have this pact in the first place. It has been said repeatedly by backbenchers on the Government side that we need a fair, firm, efficient and enforced process for dealing with the asylum seeker crisis. Everybody has acknowledged there is a crisis and some have described it as a European problem. This is a global problem. There are more people moving across the planet today seeking safety and refuge from famine, drought, climate change, conflict and persecution than at any time since the Second World War.

In the Second World War, those who moved were the Jews because they were being subjected to the Final Solution by Hitler and the Nazi Party. I am reading a very interesting book, IBM and the Holocaust. In it, the author proves that Hitler would not have been able to carry out the Final Solution without the co-operation of major corporations like IBM, Siemens, Krupps and so on. The role played by these corporations was disgraceful. We can read about the torture, persecution and absolute brutality of the Final Solution and why populations were moving. If we were to wind back the clock and be in our shoes in the 1940s, would we be talking about controlling the movement of migrants or would we be opening our arms, sitting down and starting from the point of view of saying: what can we do to help them, what can we do to make life better and how can we deal with this inhumane catastrophe in a humane way?

The starting point of the European Union, led by Ursula von der Leyen and the other leaders of countries like Belgium and France that are responsible for a colonial outpouring of civil war in the countries they occupied in Africa, is to say, “My God, this is an awful problem”. This is despite the fact the European Union has some 24% of the total global migrant population coming onto its shores and of that 24%, at its height, we had 1%, which was in 2023. There is this moral panic about the migrants who are moving and how we deal with this problem - this “European problem”, as it has been repeatedly called. This is absolutely a challenge and it is a challenge that has been created by the human activity that has led to climate change, war and persecution. It is a challenge to deal with it. However, the starting point of seeing human beings as an absolute problem is what leads to a pact of this nature.

Nobody has discussed what else is in this pact, which I acknowledge we are not opting into. However, the fact we are trying to opt into any of it is outrageous because another part of this pact is about funding what are called “safe third countries”. The first safe third country that we identify is Libya. As European Union members, we have been pouring millions - probably billions at this stage - into Libya to keep migrants from crossing the Mediterranean; to store them there, put them into detention centres there and subject them to what has been proven by Sally Hayden and others who have documented this and visited these areas as slave camps where there is rape and torture, and human beings are bought, sold and killed. These are migrants who are fleeing famine, war and persecution. The European Union’s cynicism is to say it now extends the safe countries to include Egypt, Tunisia and Albania - you name it. We look for any despotic regime and give it millions to hold onto migrants so that we in the European Union do not have to deal with it. This is one of the richest parts of the planet and we do not want to deal with human beings who are desperate. What we want to do is keep them back and curtail them. That is the cynicism of this pact. The fact that we are signing up to any of it or attempting to opt into any of it is disgraceful. We should be standing up loud and proud and rejecting the approach of the European Union.

I do not have all of the solutions and I am not standing here to be a Goody Two-Shoes and say: here is a solution that I can come up with. However, surely to God, if we have all of this bureaucracy of the EU and the various countries that are members of it, we could look at the overall state of the Union. Workers in the Union are increasingly ageing and we need a younger population. This country needs more workers, and everybody has said it. We are short of bus drivers, mechanics, teachers, doctors and nurses yet we are rejecting the potential to increase our workforce.

I say we are rejecting it because that is the starting point. The starting point is that it is a problem, not an opportunity and a challenge. The reason we are starting from there is that because of the way the world is run, it is all about where the profit goes and who makes the most money, just as it was when Hitler used the IBM company to design a computer system that would help him to carry out the Final Solution of the annihilation of 6 million Jews. It is the same basis on which we were organised then that we are organised now. That is what leads us to say that human beings are a problem rather than an opportunity and something we need to recognise as having the potential to make the world a better place for everybody, including themselves.

I want to challenge something said by the Minister of State, Deputy Carroll MacNeill. She said that Europe has to maintain the rule of law and that, in maintaining the rule of law, we need to look at how migrants are treated. There was a BBC report on what happens on Greek soil with the Greek coast guard. The BBC interviewed a series of different people who were trying to escape from the countries they came from, for example, Cameroon, Somalia and Sudan. The accounts they gave were chilling. One asylum seeker said:

We had barely docked, and the police came from behind - two policemen dressed in black, and three others in civilian clothes. They were masked, you could only see their eyes.

They took a man from Cameroon and another from Ivory Coast, transferred them to a coast guard boat and then threw the Cameroonian man into the water. The Ivorian man said: ‘Save me, I don’t want to die”. They then threw him in the water and as they watched his body go below, his hand was up asking to be saved, and they just watched and watched while his hand slipped down and the man was drowned. Another witness talked about the Greek coast guard punching a migrant in the head until they almost killed him.

Then we had the episode of the Greek coastguard allowing 600 people to die, with 923 in total dead so far this year. Where has the Greek Government been taken to court by the EU over breaking the law? It has not.

The Minister of State mentioned what goes on in Belarus and the dumping of refugees over the border. She is right, and there is a film on next week about that called "Green Border". It has won prizes. They dump them over the border into Poland. They literally throw their bodies - these were Syrian refugees - over the barbed wire into Poland. Then what do the Polish guards do? They pick them up and throw them right back. Where has the Polish Government ever been taken to an EU court if the EU rule of law is so important? It is hypocrisy. It is nonsense.

Now we have more and more Palestinians trying to escape the situation in Gaza, which has been contributed to hugely by the EU, particularly since Germany and the EU helped to arm the Israeli Government. As Palestinians flee that and come here, we say, "We have to doubt you, question you and fast-track your applications. Let us look twice at what is going on here."

The whole starting point of the EU asylum and migration pact is one of cruelty. It is not one of humanity and not one of opportunity. It refuses to recognise the wealth in this continent, compared with that of the continents from which these people come. It refuses to recognise the opportunities that are there. In this country, what we have refused to recognise is that all the services we lack - whether it is the fact that we have only seven GPs for every 10,000 people when we should have 12, the fact that we have 4,000 more people in homeless accommodation and 100,000 people on waiting lists or the fact that our health service is in crisis - are the fault of consecutive governments led by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, particularly since austerity that was imposed on us by the EU after the 2008 bank crash. If we were to recognise that as a starting point, we would not be blaming communities or migrants but would be saying the fault lies with those who have run this Government and those who allowed the bank bailout to cripple us and to cripple Greece. Then, when the migrants start looking for help and safety, they become the problem. We should start again and look at them not as a problem - as a challenge, yes - but as an opportunity to make this world a better place. That is the real, fundamental problem with the migration pact. It is that it sees everything in terms of human beings as a problem. That is why we need to reject it.

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