Hear, hear.

Sentiment score: 0.00

I was first elected to Waterford City and County Council back in 2004. Sometimes, I have to pinch myself that it has been 22 years since I was first elected to the council. I learned a very harsh lesson very quickly in the first number of weeks I was elected. In the biggest working-class housing estate in the ward I represented in Waterford city, there was a plan to put in place a service in a house right in the middle of the estate by an organisation that supported people with drug and addiction problems. There was a lot of fear in the community. Some people dismissed the fear as irrational and people were not listened to. I was a local councillor and I received phone calls at the time. People who lived in the community came up to me and asked me what was happening. People with drug problems and alcohol problems were going to be coming in and living in the community. They were asking who they were, what was this organisation and so on. For weeks, there was a vacuum. The vacuum made the situation worse and it got to a point where there was a meeting in the local community centre that was full. There was a lot of tension. It struck me very quickly that the people who were speaking had genuine concerns. The problem I very quickly saw was that the fears they had been raising were dismissed as irrational. That was what was causing the problem. Those of us on the council, and two of us especially, proposed at the meeting to bring in the organisation that provides the service at a future meeting. Let us hear the organisation out and see what it provides. Let us see what this will mean and then, people can make decisions. That happened in a follow-up meeting. It was much more positive and a bit more calm. A small number of residents were selected to go and visit centres in different parts of the State where the same organisation had similar houses providing similar services. Over time, the fear dissipated. The service providers won over the local community. That service has been there for the past 22 years and nobody gives it a second look. In fact, it is supported by the local community. It was a very harsh lesson for me that if you do not communicate, if you do not listen to communities and do not engage and if you dismiss as what you might see as an irrational fear as an irrational fear that somebody or a community has, you then lose those communities. That is what happened for a very short time in that instance. We all know those very same communities. We all know them. You can pick any working-class community or any community in this State. There are strong community leaders. There are people who run the local community groups, local crèches, the soccer club, the hurling club, the boxing club and so on and they are people of good standing. They are people who have built up those communities that very often have been ignored by the Government and left behind. There were high levels of deprivation and low levels of educational attainment. They are the same areas where classroom sizes have often been too big. We do not have enough teachers. These were big working-class communities that were built without proper amenities that had to be built up and it was hard fought and hard won over a large number of years. Trust in the system, the establishment or the Government is always very low. There is always a mistrust because they always have had to fight for everything. They have a fear or view that the Government does not always have their back or very rarely has had their back, as they see it. I come then to the immigration issue, because it broke my hearts to see all the wrong moves made by the Government where again, people's fears were dismissed as irrational. People were called racists at times for raising for what they saw at times as very legitimate issues from their perspective because they are their own communities. The people who were ignored were obviously the communities but also those strong community leaders. We had a resource. We had networks. We had opportunities to mobilise those positive forces to actually engage with communities and we did not use them. What happens then is all of those bad faith actors and those on the extreme of politics come in and mix it up. They come in with their mobile phones - we have all been victims of it - and put them in our faces asking us were we consulted, were we engaged and what is our position. Communities and those community leaders, who are good people, end up on the back foot. They are on the back foot - including local representatives - because the Government absolutely failed. I thought about this issue long and hard over the last number of years because it has evolved. We have more people coming. There are people who are fleeing poverty, war and persecution. People are coming for all sorts of different reasons. I believe in a rules-based system. We had a discussion on this and I raised these issues on Second Stage where I said I support the rules-based system. If I want to go to America, I have to abide by its rules. I have to get an ESTA form and I have to go through customs. If I want to go Australia, I have to abide by its rules. I do not mind that. We must have rules. People want the system to be fair for people who are coming but they also want that system to be efficient and it has not been efficient. People have seen the failures with their own eyes and it has not been enforced. When they see a system that is not enforced, that is the big weakness and that is the problem. When there is then no consultation of any kind with communities, including elected representatives being the last to know, those communities being the last to know and people who live in the communities and those community leaders being the last to know about anything that is happening about IPAS accommodation, it creates suspicion and mistrust. Sometimes, that is exploited, as we have seen by those bad faith actors. That vacuum that was created has allowed those people to come into those communities and sow more distrust. To me, that was the most heartbreaking part of what happened over the past number of years. If we have not learned those lessons, shame on us and shame on the Government. The amendment that is being put forward here by Deputy Carthy is an entirely sensible one where it talks about community impact assessments. The Minister might disagree with some of what is in that. He might disagree that it should be the local authority that should do them. The Minister might even disagree with the concept. I do not know. We will see what the Minister will say in a few minutes. What is the alternative? That is the question that has to be asked of Government. What is the alternative? I met a group of people who live in Lismore, County Waterford, about three years ago. I met them in Lismore, I met them again in Dublin and I think I met them in Dungarvan as well. They were a mix of ordinary people who live in working-class housing estates. There were business people there and there were about ten people at the first meeting. The reason I met them was because the hotel in Lismore was being used as IPAS accommodation. It is the only hotel in the town of Lismore. I had to accept that was not the best location. In fact, at the time, the plan was to reopen that as a hotel. If you walk down the main street of Lismore, half the shops that are there are gone. That is down to the desolation of rural communities. Post offices have been taken out. Schools have closed and Garda stations have closed. Housing was not provided in those areas. Those towns then end up not being properly supported. When I went there the first time to meet them, I walked down the street and I was shocked at how many premises were empty. There was one coffee shop. It was about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I walked up to the front door and there was a sign on the door that said it was closed for a half day. I went into the butchers next door to ask why the cafe was closed and they said it was because there are no customers. The coffee shop routinely closes because there is no business. The one hotel in that town was then used for IPAS accommodation. The people there who I met genuinely had no difficulty in supporting people who were coming. In fact, they were talking about alternative accommodation in that same town. Why can that alternative accommodation not be used? There are over 300 IPAS centres. I asked Deputy Carthy earlier how many of them are hotels still. I would say there are dozens of hotels still being used, so there has to be a plan to phase that out and to find better alternative accommodation. There was a White Paper on purpose-built State IPAS centres a long time ago. I do not know what has happened, where that is, how that is to be delivered and where the Government is at. I have heard the Minister state on many occasions that he does not believe that hotels should be used, if possible, for IPAS accommodation, but it is still happening. I am making all of those arguments because it goes back to the point I am making, which is at the core of what I am saying. If you do not listen to communities, that is a massive failure. They just want to be heard. That is all they want. They want to be heard. They want to be reassured. The want information, and when that is provided, that is the best way to ensure you win over the support of those communities. The points made by Deputy Kerrane are fair ones because Ballaghaderreen is a perfect example of where we got it wrong. There was huge support and buy-in, and local communities and people who live there supported the people who were coming and did everything possible to welcome them. They were promised additional resources would come but they never came, and that undermined the good work that was done by community leaders and local politicians in showing leadership. If you do not provide the support, that creates more resentment and a vacuum and provides an opportunity, as I said, for those bad faith actors. There are few Members of this House who would stand over some of what we have seen from a small number of people who live in our communities who attacked IPAS centres, who aggressively attacked asylum seekers, and who live on X and spread their hate, bile and all the rest of it. Nobody wants that. I want that to end. I want those people to be marginalised. I do not want those people to be listened to in the communities I represent, but if we do not do our job and if the Government does not do its job, we allow those voices to be heard. That is the biggest mistake the Government has made. The amendment that has been put forward, in my view, is reasonable. The thrust of it is what the Government needs to be looking at. If the Minister is not minded to support the amendment, he has an obligation and a responsibility to point out what it is he and the Government will do to get much better at engaging with and listening to those communities who have, unfortunately, been left behind and not properly represented by the Minister's party and the Fine Gael Party for far too long.

Sentiment score: -0.06