As the Minister knows, the vast majority of people in the country want an asylum process that provides help to those who need help and returns home those who do not need help. That should be the basis and logic of any asylum system - one that offers compassion to those who are fleeing war and violence but one where common sense is used in the system for those who are trying to use the asylum process for economic reasons. One of my major problems with this particular Bill is that it only deals with the sideshow in terms of the numbers of people coming into the country. The vast majority of people coming into the country are coming from Britain, through the North of Ireland and into this State. At least 85% are coming that way. In the last parliamentary question I asked the Minister, he said he did not know and he did not have that information.

Sentiment score: -0.01

That is worrisome and it needs to be fixed. The other aspect to this is that to deal with this issue and not look at the 85% of people coming through Britain is a problem. We need to go to Britain and to the Government in London to try to work out a process that when a person wants to apply for an application for asylum here in Ireland, they do so when they move to the island and vice versa because there are flows in both directions. It is in London's best interest to be able to know who is coming onto their island and it is in our best interest to know who is coming onto our island. One of the questions I often ask the Minister is how many people actually leave when they get a deportation order and the stock answer at this stage is we have no exit checks. The reason we have no exit checks coming into this country is that we have a Border in the middle of our island. The only way to actually resolve this whole situation is not with this particular Bill. This is only a minor part of it. The vast majority of it is regularising who is moving from the island of Britain onto the island of Ireland. That is not just a chuckle. That is not just a difficult situation that can never be resolved. It is a real fact that has to be dealt with at some stage by this House. It is bigger than this Bill. It is five or six times bigger than this Bill in actual numbers. That is one thing that pretty much everybody is missing when they talk about this issue. The second issue here is we also need to make sure that we realise laws without enforcement mean nothing. I submitted a parliamentary question on the current law, the Dublin III regulation, shows that about 2% of the people who were entitled to return to other countries and who have applied for asylum in other countries initially were actually returned by this Government. Even with the laws the Government has, it is not implementing those laws. Creating new laws does not make certain it will actually implement them either. In my constituency office at the moment, we have a lot of people coming into the office - who we are helping - who have applied for asylum first in Italy and are now in Ireland. Last year, it was people who applied for asylum first in Sweden who are now in Ireland. As a result of different countries doing different things with their asylum processes, there are shifts in the direction of people and people are moving as a result of different regimes' experiences throughout the European Union. It is really important there is some confidence given to people that where we have a law and a reasonable right to return people to the country where they first applied for asylum, that is actually actioned. That is not the case at the moment. On the sovereignty issue that is at the heart of this particular Bill, that remains the case. Nobody knows the future but if you have self-determination on a particular issue, you can actually change your laws and approaches to deal with whichever situation arises. However, if you outsource that to the likes of the EU, you will not be able to manoeuvre as deftly to situations that arise in the future. That is at the heart of the difficulty within this particular Bill. There are good things within this and there are logical changes within this but most of those could be achieved by the Government voluntarily entering those aspects of the Bill.

Sentiment score: 0.07

The Minister mentioned that people voted for European integration and co-operation. That is absolutely true but there has been significant creep in terms of EU control on a range of different issues in recent years. EU integration is not always a good thing. The EU often makes decisions that are not in our interests. The Mercosur agreement is a full example of that. The Minister talks about us making a democratic decision here. The Parliament on College Green made a democratic decision to wind itself up at that particular time. The question is: what direction are those democratic decisions pointing in? These are democratic decisions pointing in a reduction of our own sovereignty. That is the case. The Bill exposes this country to fines and costs into the future. I mentioned earlier the 2% successful return rate under the Dublin III regulation of people who were living here but who had applied for asylum in other countries. A reply to a parliamentary question by the Minister this week showed that half of the deportation orders issued by the Government are still not being implemented either in a voluntary fashion or an enforced fashion. The majority of deportation orders in this country are still not being implemented, which is an incredible situation. These are the weaknesses. Anther weakness is the Government is putting adult asylum seekers into children's accommodation, which is quite incredible and with devastating effects. Locking Ireland into these regulations with a clear history of Government inability to even implement the laws that exist will expose the country significantly to penalties in the future. That is a big problem and a big worry.

Sentiment score: -0.07