Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Senator Davitt was not even born. The €90 billion that is the subject matter of this appropriation is colossal compared with what we were dealing with in the hard-pressed days of the 1980s, when this country was in very poor order indeed. Sometimes we ask whether we have made progress, and there are many critics of the State, but we should remember that in the 1980s there was mass emigration and colossal taxation, and the State ran virtually everything that moved, did not move or did not move fast enough, including transport, communications, insurance companies, shipping companies, energy production and broadcasting. The transformation in our living standards has been dramatic. Sometimes I wish that some social commentary would actually give us some marks for the changes that have taken place, whereby a country that was in a hopeless state in the 1980s has reversed its fortunes and done so well. With events in America, I have no doubt there are more challenges coming down the line, but I emphasise that we live in a very different world from the one that obtained at the beginning of my parliamentary life.

There is one thing in particular that I want to mention to the Minister. In Schedule 1, there is an allocation of €7.9 billion for the Office of the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. Not all of this money relates to those seeking asylum, but a considerable portion does. I have always eschewed the politics of being negative on immigration per se because, to go back to the debate we had earlier on paying people a living wage, the people who are not getting the living wage are, for the most part, immigrants. Let us remember that. The immigrants run so many vital aspects of our lives. This country’s expanding population is driven in large part by immigration, and our health services and a series of aspects of our lives depend on it. We should be positive about that. However, there is a conflation of asylum seeking and regulated immigration. We have to have a society that understands that immigration should be controlled, directed and in the interest not merely of the receiving state but also immigrants themselves.I regard it as a probability – I hope to God I am right on this - that the Minister will be at the Cabinet table in the months and years to come. The time has come for the European Union, not Ireland on its own because it cannot do it by itself, to revisit the conventions and those two pillars of the present law in respect of asylum seeking. I mention this because, within the European Union, the Schengen free travel area is collapsing. The CDU in Germany is now saying it has to revisit the matter of asylum seeking. Even the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, is saying that this is no longer sustainable. We wrote the right to asylum seeking into the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It has its own paragraph, or couple of paragraphs, which gives the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg the right to impose on member states the manner in which they deal with this problem. It has not been a success. If we are going to be stuck with the EU asserting a competence in this area, it should be bold enough to reassess the fundamental cornerstones of asylum seeking and to distinguish between mass migration on the one hand and controlled immigration on the other hand. If we do not do that, we are in trouble. What I am really saying to the Minister is that the expenditure in this area, however many billions of euro it is, amounts to the fifth-largest departmental expenditure. It is a huge departmental expenditure, which exceeds that of all sorts of other Departments that people might think are very important.

With regard to those funds and whether we can sustain asylum seeking in its current model into the future, the Government must be honest with the people. Not only must the Government say there is a problem, it must be committed to working with other member states of the European Union, not through the recent migration pact, which will not deal with the issue, but on the fundamentals. If the Christian Democratic Union in Germany have come to the conclusion, like many other European parliamentarians, that the fundamentals of the 1951 Refugee Convention have to be revisited, we should support that. We should be willing to say we support that and not be afraid of doing so, while at the same time holding the line that migrants into Ireland who come here lawfully and have played such an important role in Ireland are to be respected and their rights to be upheld. This is something that, over the next ten years, is going to cause increasing damage to Europe for want of political courage on the part of our parliamentarians.