International Protection, Asylum and Migration: Motion Dail Éireann — 2024-06-18 ============================================================ Michael Healy-Rae (IND), Kerry This pact is about trust. Having canvassed extensively over recent months, like the Ministers, what I am hearing at the doors is that the people do not trust the Government when it comes to migration, and it is hard to see how you could disagree with them when we see the chaotic scenes. I will give a couple of examples. One day, all the agencies of the State come and remove tents in Mount Street and along the canal. They grab them, take them away and dump them. They move the people along and put up barriers, and the following day, they give out new tents and the same thing happens again. It is a lack of what the people would see to be direction and leadership. That is what people are crying out for. They are asking how it can be right that people can just get onto a plane. We heard Michael O'Leary, a man who is often vilified in this House but for whom I have nothing but the highest of respect because he did an awful lot for the airline industry in this country. I listened very carefully when he came to the Houses the other day and spoke about passports and documentation being flushed down toilets on aeroplanes. It is a fact people were getting on planes with their documentation and when they arrived here, they did not have documentation. I got those statistics from the Minister's Department and I was very glad to get them. It showed shockingly what has happened. That would not be tolerated anywhere. Any one of us cannot get onto a plane, land somewhere, such as in the US, and say I had my documentation but I do not have it any more, or that I am just here now and please accept me. That would not be tolerated, and we were tolerating it here for a long time. I see that the Government is finally waking up to the reality that we were being taken for fools in many instances, and that is not to make little of people who came here because they had to come here. I have seen pictures of people's homes having been bombed and of people with nothing but a couple of bags in their hands, but this is a completely different thing we are talking about. On the one hand, we are talking about people fleeing from a genuine war and, on the other, there are people coming here because it is better to come here than to go somewhere else. The Government really has to wake up to this. That is one of the reasons I cannot support this pact when it is put to a vote tomorrow at midnight. I ask the Government to listen to the people because it did not listen to them previously. It did not listen to them in the recent referendums and it was proved wrong in that regard. The vast majority of people are not for this either because, quite simply, they do not trust the Government given what it allowed to continue happening for so long. --- 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/2024-06-18/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:53:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2024-06-18