Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-05-14 ============================================================ Ivana Bacik (LAB), Dublin Bay South Meta has failed to take responsibility for the hate speech it is facilitating. The former Taoiseach, Mr. Ahern, remains a member of the Council of State. He is more than just a private person making ignorant remarks at a doorstep. As he should know, discourse around migration must be rooted in facts, humanity and respect. That is why the Labour Party, just last month, launched the Together We Thrive campaign. Our promotes the urgent need for a fair, fact-based national conversation on migration that highlights the enormously positive contribution made by those with migrant backgrounds to our society and our economy, and this is clear from the figures. We know the health and social care sectors, in particular, rely heavily on migrant workers. The Tánaiste knows that nearly one in four nurses and midwives employed by the HSE comes from abroad. I met this morning with representatives of Nursing Homes Ireland, who confirmed that the nursing home sector simply could not function without the migrant workers who make up a huge proportion of its workforce. However, we are failing many of those migrant workers. I met yesterday with members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO. They told me about the enormous delays in the system for nurses working here who seek to have spouses and children join them from abroad. I heard directly from those affected heartbreaking stories of family separation due to the delays in processing visas for family reunification. I spoke to a mother who works in cancer care in Rathgar, in my constituency, whose two daughters aged 4 and 7 have been living in Ghana with their grandmother for the past two years while they wait for permission to come here. We are failing the people whose work is building our communities. We need to change our rhetoric and improve their reality. We must improve the family reunification process. Moreover, we need to be careful about our language. Does the Tánaiste condemn Bertie Ahern's comments? Will he call on him to apologise? Will he support my party's Together We Thrive campaign for a fair, fact-based and positive conversation about 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/2026-05-14/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:56+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-14