Jen Cummins calls for fairer immigration and teacher pathways

00:01 The role of migrants in this country, as my colleague has said, is so important. 00:06 We go, people come, that's how it is, and I think that our hospitals wouldn't exist 00:11 without people coming from all over the world, our restaurants, how would they manage? 00:16 I'd like to mention teachers who are coming here, people who want to set up life here 00:20 because it's a great place to live. 00:21 They want to work as teachers, but it's incredibly difficult because the pathway through the 00:26 teaching council is incredibly difficult, and that's something that I think we need 00:30 to consider. 00:31 We need to mature as a country when we have people coming from elsewhere as to how they 00:35 can become teachers within our country. 00:37 We want to broaden out that career for everybody, we want to make sure that those young people 00:43 who are coming from migrant backgrounds and their parents are coming from migrant backgrounds 00:46 can see teachers from other countries, not just from our own. 00:50 I really think that the categorisation of human beings is quite difficult. 00:55 My own husband is a migrant, he came here because he loved Ireland, he thinks it's fantastic, 01:01 but there is a categorisation of who comes here and who's allowed to stay here, based 01:06 on colour, based on where they come from, based on social class, based on lots of different 01:11 things, and I think we need to get a grip of that because as climate change happens 01:15 there will be more and more people who come here, and there will be more and more people 01:18 who will have to come here. 01:19 We only saw that from the heat in Europe this summer. 01:22 People were dying because of that heat. 01:25 We have a lovely temperature here, it was also very hot, but we are going to see that 01:29 necessary happening. 01:30 I do want to end on a positive note, because Minister, you were there at my husband's naturalisation 01:35 ceremony in Killarney this year, and it was an absolutely amazing day, and there was 4,500 01:40 people I think over the course of that day who became Irish citizens, and since the new 01:46 announcement has been made, a lot of people, like Deputy Rice has said, have come to my 01:50 clinics in particular to plead that they are here, they want to make a life here, they 01:54 want to be citizens of this amazing country, so we need to have a fair, humane, and also 02:00 an evidence-based approach to how we do naturalisation and also immigration here.