I welcome the opportunity to speak on this legislation and compliment Deputy McGuinness on his thoughtful and positive speech. It is clear what he said was informed by his dealings with members of the immigrant community at different levels and with the organisations which seek to address their needs. The experience he describes is identical to mine in the cases I encounter every Saturday.
I must begin by correcting the record with regard to yesterday's speech by the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform. It included a paragraph which I suspect was not written by any public official or member of his Department. It stated:
I say this to underline one truth which has emerged about the matter in the meantime. The Labour Party, albeit after a tetchy internal debate in which Deputy Rabbitte's advice was narrowly rejected and Deputy Michael D. Higgins's views won out, decided to oppose this referendum.
There is not a scintilla of evidence for this. As I said, I suspect no official of his wrote this because it would be a disgrace to have done so without any basis in fact. I find it difficult to say but it is an invention and a pure fabrication. I must stay within the terms of this House but it is what would be described in other circumstances as a straightforward lie. It finds itself in print and I call on the Minister to either substantiate or withdraw it.
The Labour Party's national executive and parliamentary party in joint session discussed the attitude to the referendum at a meeting in the RDS. A consensus emerged at this meeting and no vote was taken, but this does not matter to the Minister, Deputy McDowell. It is interesting to contrast the thoughtful speech by Deputy McGuinness with the outrageous inability to listen of the present Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform. He has responded to numerous questions, not only with regard to this legislation but especially in the period before the referendum, with a type of smug indifference. I speak of that sneer which comes on the face of the privileged when they have to listen to arguments about rights, how they sit in smug composure, deaf to every argument, full of arrogance, and willing to trample over the truth, and in this case abuse it. The Minister has, in his opening speech, put a complete untruth on the record in which he asked for reason in the debate after claiming he was undemocratically shouted down when he suggested the referendum.
I refer now to other aspects of his speech yesterday. Will he tell us the basis for the alleged crisis into which the Constitution was thrown by the birth of less than 250 babies in the Dublin maternity hospitals? How was the Constitution challenged by it? I accept the will of the people. I am a democrat. However, what we are deciding now and what we decide when we vote on this Bill, is the adequacy of the legislative response to the result of the referendum and the choice of people. We will judge the legislation by certain criteria.
Yesterday, the Minister repeated in his speech what he said previously. He stated:
I do not need to spell out for Deputies in any great detail the background against which this Bill has evolved. Suffice to say that it is intended primarily to deal with the abuse of our citizenship code whereby persons with the most tenuous of links to Ireland [He is not talking about our tax exiles such as Sir Anthony O'Reilly or others of that ilk] have been arranging their affairs so as to have their child born in Ireland, even if they have no particular intention of staying here, and thereby securing EU rights of residence deriving from the child's Irish and EU citizenship.
How many people were we talking about? I respect those people in charge of our Dublin maternity hospitals, but they have had a long time to reflect on this. I wonder whether the Hippocratic oath, where doctors pledge themselves to the life of the child and the mother in such circumstances, requires them to come clean and say what they said to the Minister. The Minister stated that they implored him to do something. He went on to give the impression that they asked him for legislation and a constitutional change. They later denied this, but the harm had been done. The harm was not corrected by their silence.
The Minister went on to state in his speech:
In addition, our asylum system has been used by people who do not have a genuine need for protection under the Geneva Convention as a vehicle to gain entry into the State, in circumvention of normal immigration controls, for the very purpose of giving birth here and availing of what hitherto has been a universal entitlement to Irish citizenship derived from birth in Ireland.
Where are the figures to prove this? Different people floated figures, so to speak, to suggest that the proportion of people abusing the asylum system was such and such a figure. The Minister has responsibility for justice. If he makes such statements, he should quantify them. He should produce the figures.
I have a question relating to the text of the Bill that we are discussing this afternoon. What is the position with regard to a pregnant asylum seeker who goes through a process whereby it is decided whether she is a legitimate asylum seeker? This process ends after the usual couple of years and she gets the response that she is a legitimate asylum seeker. In the meantime her baby has been born. What is the position of that baby with regard to citizenship under this legislation? Will the Minister turn his attention to that issue?
The Minister continued his speech in his manner, known as the tradition of arrogance that the privileged sometimes inflict on democrats, to pour abuse on those who opposed the referendum. I hope he was not referring to me. For example, I made a mistake with regard to one aspect of the Nigerian constitution as amended, section 35, but I corrected it within 48 hours. My mistake was based on a case stated to me of a woman who had approached the Nigerian embassy and got a different answer. I accepted that the Nigerian constitution had been changed. However, if I had spoken in the radio programme that morning about "a non-national woman", everything I said would have been absolutely correct.
Let us be clear about the position. Until this referendum, we had a position of jus soli, which although out of step with the other European countries, was shared by approximately 41 or 42 other countries. I accept my argument about jus soli has been defeated. However, let me not have to listen to the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy McDowell, seek to impute that those people on the other side of the argument are intellectually dishonest. I know what is intellectually dishonest. It is a Minister with responsibility for justice who puts a blatant untruth into the second page of his speech. That is dishonest, yet he has not got the courage to come into the House and withdraw his scurrilous allegation. I have noted, and not only on this matter, that he is the kind of man who wrestles with his Rolex while all around the country all sorts of issues of justice decompose before him. The people of this country have mostly, but not totally, disposed of that tradition, but he at least remains consistent to it.
I now turn to some other aspects of this piecemeal legislation. I did not promise to have a complete and comprehensive immigration Bill, but the Minister did in 2001. However, during his speech, having moved on from a stated untruth, he stated that a working paper was being prepared. I apologise, I mean, a discussion paper. We get a discussion paper after years of people in this House agreeing that we should draw a distinction between asylum seekers, economic migrants, those on work permits, relatives of these categories, people who wish to be reconciled with their families or people who simply wish to visit. We know the Minister's record is one where he has refused the rights of grandparents to visit their children, people who have spent their lives in this country.
The Minister presides over a Department where it is a kind of lottery to get through on the telephone. Deputy McGuinness was correct in his description of what occurs as we try to make sense of the situation in which we find ourselves. All the sneering in the world will not help. What we require of the Minister is justice, truth and respect for this House.
I have some other specific questions on this legislation. How did the Minister arrive at the magic figure of three years? How did the three-year rule become established? I, for example, studied abroad in the Unites States and Britain. Many people have been invited here on fellowships and some are studying in the university where I taught, NUIG. The clock starts ticking for them when they finish their studies. Why does it start then, and not when a university legitimately accepts them? I am sure the eminent Minister will want to answer that question and provide the information.
A question also arises with regard to the practice concerning relatives. We seem to believe it is perfectly all right to recruit nurses from all around the world, barely allow their partners in and then require they remain unemployed. When does the clock start ticking or end if these nurses have children? Perhaps the Minister wants to expound on the suggestion that three of their past four years have been in lawful residence in Ireland.
Half my family lives outside Ireland, some of whom are married to people from north Africa and others to people from Asia. I remember being a young student in the Ireland of the 1950s at a time when many people emigrated. In 1959, just fewer than 60,000 people emigrated and in no year of the 1950s did fewer than 40,000 people leave Ireland. They went to a Britain where there was considerable anti-Irish feeling. Now, this Government, others and many different parties are anxious to do something about the descendants of our immigrants. The case we made at a time of emigration was on the basis of the basic rights of people. It did not relate solely to how many the economy could accommodate or to whether we had decided on a set period of years. We sought equal rights.
This Minister has a curious difficulty with regard to rights and has frequently reflected this in his relationships with those working in the human rights area. There is nothing in the slightest way liberal about any of his attitudes to politics. He is an old 18th century conservative. He speaks, for example, from the most conservative position on the constitutional source of rights. We have had this debate in the United States and elsewhere. It is at the root of whether to accept the sheer existence of international law. Such law assumes that one can have the basis of a right beyond the expressed constitution of a state and leans towards the suggestion that we might, in time, have universal rights.
The aspiration and impetus of the United Nations is towards the idea that there are rights that we have as persons and by virtue of being alive. Jus soli is in that tradition. On the other hand, when one mitigates jus soli and puts conditionalities into it, an onus is placed upon one. The Minister has had a constitutional success. He created a bogus crisis which he has refused to quantify or to give figures for and has managed to introduce a measure by stealth, in a hurry and without consultation in advance with human rights organisations, North or South. He says he will consult them when he has got his way. That is the mark of the Minister’s democracy.
The treatment of unaccompanied minors is horrific. They are the most vulnerable of all. Many of them arrive in O'Connell Street and are taken in by people who offer them shelter. I visited one place where 30 were living in two rooms. Some of them go to second level education but are blocked from going to third level, even if people are willing to pay for them, on the basis that they have reached 18 years and must lie there, so to speak, half dead in a legal sense. How can we accept that as a mark of a civilised state or as one with the most minimal regard for the law? These youngsters have survived in the most extreme circumstances. They manage to forage out some semblance of an education and are then blocked. This nonsense must stop. It is un-Irish and does not reflect the very best of us. It is ungenerous and wrong.
It is wrong to use the layers of bureaucracy to drive families who are trying to survive, who have been made unemployed and many of whom are very ill to drag themselves through the process. I dealt with one case where I read the account of the appeal only two weeks ago. A woman had come from a country where the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe investigates allegations and it was suggested that because the OSCE had not reached a conclusion in the case, no suffering was involved. People have moved from one place to another are refused because they have inaccuracies relating to the place where they sought shelter. We decide, from a distance of thousands of miles, that people have made a mistake in their details. Would we like our own people to be subjected to that kind of process? This is accompanied by all the rhetoric of the happy, rich, cheerful self-confident Ireland that is bursting with wealth and which needs to be propagated throughout the world so that other backward countries can become like us. We should be ashamed of the way we treat migrants.
How much money does the Minister's Department spend on anti-racism measures and what groups benefit? Many of them say they do not have enough funds to keep going. What education programmes are taking place?
The Bill is a slight one. It is does not deal with any of the substantive issues we might have anticipated, although the Minister has had a couple of years to prepare it. Admittedly matters move slowly and they must be careful in the Minister's Department, but we would by now have expected substantial legislation from the Minister dealing with the whole issue of immigration and citizenship.
Citizenship is an interesting concept in terms of political theory from both the right and left. Obviously, one is not entitled to Irish citizenship if one pays taxes here because that would not include those who come home to rip off semi-State companies and then leave lest they acquire liability for taxes. The old conservative adage of paying one's taxes and becoming a citizen does not hold. Some citizens reside in Ireland for only three months in the year to avoid paying tax. Neither is it necessary in the Irish republic to confess to being some kind of republican because one can be given permission by the Cabinet to receive a title and then go down on one knee and get a clatter of a sword from Queen Elizabeth.
The concept of citizenship is becoming unfashionable. In every place where citizenship has been developed, from the time of the French Revolution through the American constitution, it was associated with rights. Now there are hardly any rights. If this were a progressive republic one might assume one was a citizen by virtue that one was alive and a child and one would then be entitled to security, education, shelter and a house and to participate, communicate and so forth. That has gone. Most of those matters have been replaced by the suggestion that they must be purchased. This is the Minister's philosophy. That is why one needs, as he puts it, a good grain of inequality to give people an incentive to improve themselves. I am reminded of Richard Tawney's phrase about why poor people put up with their condition. He said it was because one day one of their number might, like a tadpole, sprout a jaw, leap to earth and become a frog. That is the Progressive Democrats philosophy. As the Tánaiste, Deputy Harney, puts it, it is a case of helping those who are willing to help themselves. Meanwhile, citizenship does not apply to any aspect of universal rights.
The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform wanted to remove the Traveller community as a distinctive ethnic group and he argued that case in Europe. In his relationship with his own Human Rights Commission and in respect of disability, the Minister eschews every philosophical principle of rights and demonstrates his deep, dangerous, old, deadly conservatism. That is the frame of mind which led him to invent a crisis and a moral panic and to hold a referendum. I accept what the people decided but I am not required to say it was anything other than a bad day. It was a bad day in the way the matter was rushed and argued and it did not help Ireland as it looks forward to a pluralist or multicultural future.
Those people who exploit the politics of fear will themselves suffer. We see this in many aspects of our society. In Mrs. Thatcher's Britain where the politics of fear came to its most developed point, the companies which expanded most were security firms. One sees gated communities where people can electronically close out those who are coming down the road to get what they have. Unfortunately, many of them are presumed not to be the same colour as ourselves. That is the thinking of the politics of fear.
Our economy depends on migrant workers and we should treat them better than we ever wanted our own people abroad to be treated. I know that people come to Ireland who have simply fled from hopeless situations. We need adequate and comprehensive legislation which will deal with immigration and citizenship, remove any kind of absolute authority from the employer, give speedy recognition of international conventions on asylum and treat economic migrants humanely.
If the Government wants to start off with a clean slate, it should grant an amnesty to all those who have become clogged up in the system. If for no other reason, this should be done in recognition of the fact that many asylum seekers have made close connections with this State and their children are attending school here.
The courts will decide whether those who came here under an existing legal process can have that arbitrarily changed.
