I thank Deputy Gannon for bringing forward this amendment. I am deeply concerned to listen to the contributions here and what is being put forward and proposed by this Government. The use of violence by the State - detention is a form of violence - should have a very high bar. It should be taken extremely seriously. I have very real concerns about not just the thoughtfulness that has gone into this but also the direction of travel and what it means for human rights and natural rights and the concept of justice in this State. To be light-hearted in my contribution, I am reading fantasy novels these days. There is a conflict between various tribes in this book I am holding. It is an international bestseller-----

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It is relevant, a Cheann Comhairle. In this book they start closing the borders and detaining people from one tribe going to another. They start saying the refugees are no longer valid refugees. They start digging their heads into the sand. I read fiction to try to escape the non-fiction of our work, but sometimes there are certain echoes in fiction that tell a really important story. There is a real question here about a Government and a State that are putting their heads in the sand as to their human rights obligations, even just on a human level. It does not necessarily need to be international law. It does not even need to be concepts of justice. Even on a human level, a compassionate level and an empathetic level as to what people are experiencing, are we to say to those who are fleeing war and persecution that they will not be given rights to natural justice, human rights or any form of empathy when they come here? That seems completely out of character with the Irish State. I want to be very clear here: I do not believe that evaluating and reforming the immigration system is inherently racist, although many outside of this Chamber who are seeking reforms are. They are, thankfully, a minority in this country. While racism and systemic racism in particular must be condemned in all its forms, I fear that with the shift in immigration policy to the right, and it is a shift of immigration policy to the right, and in particular with this erasure of natural justice, natural rights and human rights, there is actually something more dangerous, more disastrous and, frankly, more terrifying. I am a big believer in democracy. I am a fervent believer in it. I am a fervent believer in the wisdom of the electorate. There are, however, times when the public get things wrong. We saw that in the UK with Brexit - buyer's remorse. We see it across the water, in the United States, with an Administration that is deeply unpopular, despite doing the things it promised to do. One of the reasons I am standing here today and why I am in politics is that I was in New York in 2016 when Trump was first elected. You could feel the sorrow on the streets of New York among New Yorkers. You could sense it. I could sense it in the offices as I went to work. I was speaking during the general election to a young man about why I went into politics and challenging what the Government is trying to do here: the rightward shift on things like immigration policy, the erosion of human rights and the erosion of the concepts of justice. I will say to the Minister of State what the young man said to me. He agreed with me and we had a very long conversation. He said the lessons of the 20th century are being forgotten. There were people who came here in the thirties, in the forties and in the fifties to escape the persecution of the forces of Europe. They came here to escape the Nazis. There were Jews fleeing the abomination of the Holocaust that Hitler created. There were people who were not Jewish who were fleeing the Nazis, fleeing Mussolini and fleeing Franco, and we gave them refuge and we gave them shelter. One of them, my constituency colleague's grandfather, started Waterford Crystal. It is a really important part of who we are and it is a really important lesson of the 20th century. I really fear that there are many states across Europe and across the world that are stridently repeating this mistake, going towards an ethnonationalism and a use of the full force of the state to enforce it. I do not think the Government is doing that here but I do think it is following a path that leads to that. The use of detention in this way is deeply concerning and deeply problematic for that reason.

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But not human rights.

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