Cabinet Committees Dail Éireann — 2023-02-14 ============================================================ Leo Varadkar (FG), Dublin West -----really misunderstands where the mainstream of European opinion now lands. These conclusions were supported by centre-left Governments, the Party of European Socialists and the European Green Party in government. For my part, I supported the conclusions on behalf of the Irish Government. I also made the case for legal pathways, which is something we in Ireland do better than other countries. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, at which I was the Minister last year, issued a record number of 40,000 work permits to economic migrants who wanted to come here and who we wanted to come here. When there are legal pathways to migration, that is the big door. We should have a big door when it comes to migration----- --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-02-14/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:34+00:00 Sitting date: 2023-02-14