Paul Murphy condemns Fortress Europe, urges legal pathways

Thanks. Taoiseach earlier said to me that nobody should be trying to make political gain out of migration. Is he going to distance himself from the conclusions of the European Council and the comments by Deputy Hawhey just there? What the European Council represented was a further hardening of the Fortress Europe policy. The tone was set by the hard-right government in Italy of Giorgia Maloney and then followed by the so-called centre-right. In particular there was agreement on reinforced cooperation on search and rescue missions in the central Mediterranean, a reference to activities of NGOs who saved the lives of people who would otherwise drown as a result of Fortress Europe policies. Twenty-five thousand people have died in the last nine years as a consequence of Fortress Europe and it has been strengthened and strengthened. Over the past eight years the aggregate length of border fences at the EU's external borders have gone from 315 kilometres to over 2,000 kilometres. There has been no attempt to address the illegal and violent pushbacks of refugees back into the ocean where they can drown. Would you reject this Fortress Europe policy which serves the interests of nobody? A particular focus was on external borders, how we can strengthen the external borders of the European Union and also on returns and how we can increase the number of returns of people who have been deemed ineligible for international protection in the European Union after an appropriate legal process. I would like to reassure deputies that those conclusions were unanimously supported. They were supported by the socialist governments, they were supported by the social democratic governments, they were supported by governments that included green parties in various parts of Europe including the socialist government in Malta, social democratic governments in Denmark for example. The mainstream centre-left in Europe supported these conclusions and to try and present them as something hard right followed by the centre-right really misunderstands where the mainstream of European opinion now lands. These were supported by centre-left governments, parties of European socialists, parties of European Greens in government supported these conclusions. For my own part I supported the conclusions on behalf of the Irish government and I also made the case for legal pathways, something we do in Ireland better than other countries. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, the Department I was the Minister for last year, issued a record number of work permits, 40,000 work permits, to economic migrants who wanted to come here and we wanted to come here. I think when you have legal pathways to migration, that is the big door, and we should have a big door when it comes to migration, but you also need controls as well. I do not agree with the view that we should have no controls at all, no nations, no borders, and I think those who have that view should be honest about it and not try to cover up the fact that that is their view that they do not believe in any returns or any borders. They should be honest about that if that is their view. As the Deputy rightly pointed out, my reference to being hard was specifically a reference to traffickers, and I do think we need to be hard on traffickers. That is what I said in Brussels, that is what I said on Sunday, that is what I am saying again here on Tuesday, and I do not see any reason to misrepresent it. You must have your own agenda if you are trying to misrepresent those words. But I do agree we all need to be careful in the words that we use. Those of us who are politicians in the centre ground need to be willing to talk about migration. We have been a little bit afraid to talk about it, quite frankly, for the last number of years. But if those of us in the centre ground do not talk about migration, we will allow the far right and the extreme left to dominate the debate in this regard, and that will not be good. That is why we need to talk about it and find ways to talk about it carefully but sensibly as well. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.