Dáil Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 19 Jun 2024

I thank the Government for facilitating this time. Whenever the vote is, I will be back to vote against the pact or our opting in at this time. As other Members have said, we are putting the cart before the horse.

Some of us are old enough to remember the Amsterdam treaty in 1998, which we voted for, and our two outings on Lisbon in 2008 and 2009. It is worth noting that we looked for certain things in that and we have to ask ourselves what has changed since then to want us to decide now, without consulting the people directly, to unilaterally remove the safeguards we sought to opt out. That is a problem for me. Only three of the current Cabinet – in fact, only three of the 18 who attend Cabinet, including the Chief Whip, the super juniors and so on - were around these Houses in 1998. In fact, the new deputy leader of Fianna Fáil was just eight years old. It would be worthwhile if some of us examined the reasons we needed and sought those opt-outs at that time.

Earlier the Minister, Deputy Burke, said of opting out that there is no plan. How can you opt out when there is no plan? He spoke of Brexit. Yet what the Government wants us to do is to opt in to the migration pact when we evidently and demonstrably have no plan such that, as Deputy Harkin has rightly pointed out, we want to legislate after the fact when it will be a fait accompli: this is what we must do; we have opted in. Is there a removal of parts of our sovereignty sought very specifically in the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Treaty of Lisbon? The answer to that question is “Yes”. Again, as Deputy Harkin rightly pointed out, it will be decided by others under qualified majority voting just how many European colleagues feel Ireland is capable of taking in the future.

We have the lowest population per square km in Europe. It is 71.

In Belgium it is 279, in Spain it is 94 and in Denmark it is 137. I wonder where the EU will feel capacity exists. It will be a fait accompli for whatever eight-year-old today is sitting at Cabinet when it is determined in Brussels that, given our low population density, Ireland is in a position to take in more of the 2.5 billion people who wish to migrate north. I do not know what age the Minister was or where she was in 1998, but I was in these Houses, and it was for a reason. That reason remains. I am not anti-migration. I am on a medical certificate to be absent from these Houses for pericarditis. I am here this evening to point out what I have been saying for the past two and a half years. The other side of the House has no strategic approach to migration. We have taken a headless chicken approach. We decided to take over our tourism businesses to house people from Ukraine while incentivising them to come here. The Minister says there is a plan when we have hundreds of people living beside the canals. It is an insult to the people of Ireland that the Government is dressing it up in such a way that any dissenting voice is the loony hard right. There is no hard right in this country, thankfully. Those few loonies who always existed got their answer in the local and European elections. However, do not be fooled that, because the Government is in the centre, everyone supports its headless chicken approach to migration. They do not. I am a centrist politician. I have helped more migrants and asylum seekers than the Minister has in her career, and I have been proud to do it. We need them as workers, but the Government needs a plan, legislation and a system that works before it hands the authority to anyone but ourselves in terms of QMV.

I ask the Minister to examine the whys of the opt-outs we sought in the Lisbon and Amsterdam treaties. They are more necessary today so that we can maintain our level of sovereignty over a system we design, which we have heretofore shown we are incapable of doing. I will vote against this proposal. On a medical certificate or not, whenever that vote is scheduled to take place, I will be here for it.