The Deputy is making the conflation, not us.

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He should represent the issue and not-----

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We do it every day.

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Shameful.

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I thank the Minister and am glad to have the opportunity to participate in the debate. This is a very serious and emotive issue. It matters to an awful lot of people. Sometimes there are debates when the political charges across the House add value but I was disappointed by Deputy Alan Kelly a short while ago. I was quite surprised by his character. It is not something I would expect from him. As my colleague said, he was conflating. Dropping in buzzwords and zingers looks good on the social media video but misrepresents what many of us here want to see, which is a supportive policy for migration that is there to protect people in international protection but that also has a robust set of rules which ensure the policy has integrity. To misrepresent that is rather shameful. When he is putting up his social media videos tonight, some of us might correct the record underneath with a comment or two. Anyway, I will get to the point. Seventy years ago, the Hungarian Revolution began. With it, a couple of buses arrived in my home village of Meelick. There was an Army encampment in Knockalisheen right on the border of counties Clare and Limerick. Those old wooden huts that the Army were barracked in during the emergency years of the Second World War became accommodation for people fleeing the Hungarian Revolution. Those little huts, which were only taken down 20 or 30 years ago, became the first refugee centre at that point. It is Ireland's longest continuously used refugee centre and we are so proud of it. Despite what Deputy Kelly might want to say on TikTok or wherever else tonight, the people who grew up there went to school with me. They were at my wedding. I played with them as a kid. They were friends and they still are. I went into the courtroom for some of them when they were being deported back to their home countries when leave to remain applications had failed. I went into the courtroom with a few people because I believed heart and soul in their story, having intimately known it. When I became a teacher in 2006, my first job when I graduated was teaching children from that refugee centre. Therefore, we are incredibly proud of that centre and our community and what it has done over the years. It is not all perfect. It is not rose-tinted. Many people have spent a decade or 12 years there waiting for their application to be cleared. It is what it is and we are proud of that. Yet, when reforms happen, those reforms need to benefit the likes of the Knockalisheen Accommodation Centre. The next place I wish to speak about is the town of Lisdoonvarna. These are local examples that are very relevant in the national context. When the Ukrainian war broke out and when international protection levels hit their peak in terms of inward migration to Ireland, Lisdoonvarna was held up as the poster town in Ireland. The population increased fourfold across a six-month period. The population was around 300 people at the beginning of the war in Ukraine and, between that and inward migration, it increased fourfold. Straight away, we had ambassadors down from different countries. We had Ministers and State agency after State agency. There were boots on the ground everywhere. It was covered on the national news every night how incredibly positive this was. Local communities organised collections. One weekend, there was a collection of bicycles for the young children there. Another weekend, it was school uniforms. Every kind of fabulous integration thing happened. Then, suddenly, all of those supports evaporated. The agencies disappeared because the local crisis had become a national crisis. We did not see any of the agencies for ages. Lisdoonvarna went from being the poster child of what international protection should look like in Ireland's best practice model to being an absolute mess that was unsupported and a community struggling. The committees that were set up to welcome started lobbying politicians telling them they needed to come back and fix things. They told them the local classes were being taught in the cloakroom of the school and there were no doctors and no services. They told them no bus services were available. The response at the time was to give people hi-vis jackets and let them walk five or six miles over the road to the local school. It was crazy stuff. In time, when this legislation passes, there needs to be some case studies done around the country of where this was not very well handled. The Minister's predecessor did not handle some of the communications of this so well either. I welcome the Minister's forthright approach in the Ministry. I think it has been welcomed by the public and by the media. The commentary is good. This Department needs to be led with confidence. Our policies need to be explained with confidence and it explained that they are very fair but are also robust. It needs to be explained that if people are coming to Ireland fleeing war, persecution, famine or turmoil in their home country, this is a very welcoming and inclusive country. Our arms will wrap around them; we will support them. However, if people are coming in under some kind of a charade or false pretences, we have an equally robust system that will examine cases fairly and, if proven to be invalid, people will be deported. That is fair and is a principle we need to defend. This is a liberal democracy but every country has a policy that needs to be robust and fair so that people here in Ireland or people who might be considering coming to Ireland know the rule book of this country and know it is implemented fairly. I will speak about some of the reasons leave to remain applications are refused. It is very easy to say, "I am from Gaza. There is a war. My country has been bombed to pieces." That is very measurable because the whole world knows what is going on there. However, in my constituency, bearing in mind we have a major refugee centre in my community, I have encountered threats from the home country. Very often, it is sub-Saharan countries in which, if people return home, their daughters will have their genitalia mutilated. I have encountered threats to people of being killed, honour killings for being gay, homophobic attacks or honour killings if there have been acts of adultery. All of these are really hard to measure. They are really hard for the individual to convey when there is a hearing about their application and very often these people are sent home. I cannot be judge or jury. I often meet people at clinics or my constituency office but I fear some of them are going back to the bear pit and to very hazardous situations. The Minister's team has to be robust and fair but there are certain issues in some countries that are very hard to measure and to verify. There needs to be a consideration of that as well. During the heat of all of this, people were out banging drums, there were protests and fires were being lit. Thankfully, that has all cooled. It had to because there was a very far-right rhetoric just grasping the nettles here and misrepresenting what Ireland was all about. There is one key point regarding this idea of male-only accommodation. From a policy point of view, we should just get rid of it. I have never seen any group in society segregated according to gender. There are no male-only housing estates. I have yet to see one. There is no female-only housing estate. There is?

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Schools. Okay, fair point. The Deputies might speak through the Chair next time. The point I am making on living arrangements is that there is no one living in gendered segregation. It is not right for the men living there and it is not right for their spouses, girlfriends or family members. It is not right at all and it needs to be part of policy going forward that we integrate. I spoke in a debate earlier relating to the Minister's Department and the suspension of those gardaí in Limerick. That is concluded. Going forward, will the Minister please appoint the most senior leadership roles in An Garda Síochána from within the organisation of An Garda Síochána? We do not need to be looking north of the Border to find the next leader and the next Commissioner. We need people who understand the spirit of policing by consent and the spirit of discretion that is so central to Garda policing. Those are just my own thoughts but I hope it might be factored into the next appointment.

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