Aontú believes that we, as a people, should do our best to try to provide help to those who are fleeing war and violence. We believe there are many people in Ireland who are migrants who are making a valuable contribution to our country and our society. They are essential in many sectors and this country would not function properly only for those individuals. We also believe that when a person is here legally, they should be treated with respect, and that the colour of a person's skin is of no more significance than the colour of their eyes.
Six years ago we in Aontú called for a respectful conversation about the issue of immigration in this country. We were slammed by every single other political party in the Dáil at the time. Every party accused us of damaging the cohesion of the country. We stated that if we do not have a respectful conversation in this country, the conversation is not going to disappear. It will simply get pushed underground to the ne'er-do-wells who will use people's concerns for their own negative benefit. That is exactly what has happened over the past six years. The inability of the political establishment to reflect the concerns of Irish citizens across the country has pushed hundreds of thousands of individuals into the ecosystem of some of the most extreme people in Irish society. This was a major mistake by this Government.
As it happens, we have seen that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin have flipped on this issue in the past couple of years. I welcome that. Sinn Féin flipped in large part because it was run from the doors in its working class heartlands across this country on this particular issue. However, there are still four other political parties in this Chamber who do not think we even have the right to have a debate. With People Before Profit, any individual action taken by the Minister to ameliorate some of the difficulties here led to name calling, association with Trump, and looking to show this individual as an extreme individual. Do not shut down democratic debate. It was incredible that for four years the vast majority of people in all polling companies' polls were saying they wanted a stricter immigration system, and one political party, the smallest in Leinster House, Aontú, was the only one actually articulating that view. That is quite an incredible situation to happen. There is a political bubble where people are not able to listen to the people they are meant to represent and who are caught up in a peer pressure in which they do not have the backbone to be able to speak with their own intellect and moral compasses.
Look at what happened over that period of time. I put in a parliamentary question to the previous Minister for Justice, Deputy McEntee, approximately four years ago, asking where most people were registering for asylum in this country. That parliamentary question showed 85% registered at the International Protection Office in Mount Street. I scratched my head wondering why people were registering for asylum in Mount Street when they were coming through ports and airports.
When I went back to the Minister, Deputy McEntee, at the time and asked where the people applying for asylum in Mount Street were coming from, she said she did not know. It is incredible that an individual who was being well paid - €180,000 a year - to do a job did not even have the curiosity to find out where people applying for asylum in Ireland were coming from. Six months later, I asked again where people were coming from and whether the Minister was asking the question as to where they are coming from. She said they were not asking them where they were coming from. That is an incredible situation.
Six months later, I put in another question. The Minister admitted then that she was asking the question but at that stage, she said the information was not being collated in a fashion that would enable her to give us that information. It took three years of questioning for the Minister, Deputy McEntee, to admit that 85% of the population coming into the country were coming from Britain through the North of Ireland. It is an incredible situation.
The EU migration pact, which we are discussing today, does not fix that problem. A person can fly from Liverpool into Belfast currently without a passport and without seeking asylum. There is obviously never going to be a border between North and South. It is impossible, it is not wanted and it would not be able to function. The logical conclusion is to put in an Irish Sea border for the movement of people. People said the unionists would not accept it. Unionists have accepted an Irish Sea border for the movement of goods. They were forced to do so under the Windsor Framework. Our engagement with British politicians has highlighted to them that there is a flow of migrants from the South into the North and Britain. It is in London's and Ireland's best interests, as good neighbours, to have a good fence to be able to understand where people are moving. If people want to come from Britain to Ireland, North or South, they should apply for asylum at the airport or port they land at on the island of Ireland. It is the only way to manage the movement of people in Ireland.
I submitted parliamentary questions asking how many people were coming to Ireland without passports or travel documents. The Government stated that in 2023, 5,000 people landed in Dublin Airport without a passport or travel document. That is an incredible situation. People who had to get on a flight in another European country simply did not have their document available when they landed. I asked how many people were being deported and was informed that only about 5% of the individuals subject to deportation orders had their deportations enforced. I asked how many were deported in another fashion and the Minister said that some of those people were being deported voluntarily. When I asked how many the Minister was sure had left, she said she did not know and that there were no exit checks. We do not check if people leave the country or not. I asked the Minister why there are no exit checks and she said it is because we have a Border with the North of Ireland. We cannot have exit checks in Ireland if we have an open Border between North and South.
We asked how many people were failing in the application process. At that time, about 30% of people were failing their first application. We realised there was something wrong and the Government was not being strict enough with regard to its tests for those applications. We were proved right because 80% of people who apply are now failing their first application. There has been a massive jump from about 30% to 80% in two or three years. What happened? Was it the case that we had a different cohort of people coming to this country or was it that the Government was simply not testing properly in relation to the people coming into the country three or four years ago? Is it the case that the Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, is testing properly, and the Minister, Deputy McEntee, was not?
We had a situation where tens of thousands of people were coming into the country and spending years having their applications processed. We had to pay for their accommodation. Some 80% of those applications were going to fail, but we can take that figure down to 60% because some of those who appeal have the initial failure overturned. Some 60% of the people who spent years in accommodation in Ireland were not asylum seekers but we were paying €1.2 billion for their accommodation. That is an incredible situation for any Government to allow over that period of time. The Government sent out a message that if you come to Ireland, you can apply and it will take years for your application to be processed. If your application fails, you can apply for appeal and it will take years for your appeal to be processed. If you fail the appeal, you can get a judicial review, and it will take years for your judicial review to be processed. If you fail at the judicial review, you get a deportation order, which will never be implemented. This incredible and dysfunctional situation created by the Government costs billions of euro, creates turmoil across the country and nobody is ever held to account for it.
We have had a significant increase in the number of people coming into the country claiming asylum. The figure has been in or around 18,000 per year for many years. In terms of work permits, the figure is about 40,000 per year and in terms of student visas, there are about 60,000 people coming in every year. There is also a significant number of people coming in from Ukraine. If you increase the population of the country by the population of Galway city on an annual basis and you do not build the infrastructure of Galway city on an annual basis, you are going to create problems. Galway has a university, a university hospital, dozens of schools and tens of thousands of houses. If you do not keep up with that population increase in terms of infrastructure, you are going to create stresses and strains, albeit not among middle-class and wealthy people who will be able to provide for themselves. The people who will compete for the scarce resources will typically be the working-class people across the country. That is why the stresses and strains of the Government's policies have mostly been seen in working-class places over the past while.
It is important that I say this. The Government is responsible for the housing crisis, without a shadow of a doubt. There is nobody else responsible for it. However, if you restrict and have a static supply of houses and raise the demand at the same time, you will increase the price of houses and rents and make houses less available to people. It is maths, economics and physics. You cannot hold supply static, raise demand and expect there to be houses for everybody and house prices or rents to remain low.
In regard to IPAS, that situation is an incredible one. The Government set fires in many towns and villages in the country. It would not even talk to local communities. There were communities with hotels in one part of the town and another hotel in another part of the town. The Government took one without talking to the community, which would have been happy if the Government had gone for the other. That created stresses and strains and significantly reduced the tourist market. In some counties, 10% of all hotel beds were taken up by IPAS. This approach made millionaires of people, cost €1.2 billion on an annual basis and got rid of planning. If I want to build a little house for my granny at the back of my house so she can live safely beside me, I have to go through planning. Why is planning good? It makes sure the local authority applies the law and it gives local people an influence over the development of society. The Government deleted planning. Aontú will bring a planning Bill to the Dáil next week, which will seek to reintroduce planning for IPAS in the future.
Another issue is that the Government does not know the identity of everybody coming into the country. It is important to say that. The Government gives the impression that it does know but it does not. I know of numerous examples of the Government putting adults into Tusla accommodation for children. Whereas Garda vetting is needed to place an adult near a child, the Government has put adults into Tusla accommodation for children. We have also seen in recent court cases that some asylum seekers have presented with multiple and often contradictory identities. Some have different names, dates of birth and countries of origin.
Where laws have existed, the Government has not implemented them. The Minister has the right to reduce migrants, even European migrants, if they break the law and are criminals. Answers to parliamentary questions I submitted show there has been a static low number of criminals removed from this country over the past number of years. There has been a little change from the Minister recently, which I welcome, but for most of those five years, that figure was static. The Minister also has the right to remove people who are not earning a living here. If people who come here have never had a job, he can remove them and send them back to another European country. That has not been done, in the main. There are hundreds of examples of European citizens living in Ireland who are dependent on social welfare and not earning a living, and Jozef Puška was a prime example of that. He did not work in this country from 2017 until the year he murdered Ashling Murphy.
There has been a big change in Ireland. According to the 2022 census, 20% of the population, or 1 million people, were born outside of this country.
That is a significant number. We are moving now to having 25% - we are at just under 25% - of the population of the State born outside of the country. Nobody ever speaks about that fact. It is a very high figure and it will make it difficult to have a sustainable society into the future. The European average is 13.9%, in the US it is 15% and in Britain it is 16%. We are at around 23% at the moment. This is a radical change.
A Labour Party representative spoke positively in the Chamber about the contribution migrants make in Ireland. Nobody is arguing that fact. There is not one person in the country who does not say there are hundreds of thousands of migrants who are contributing with value to our society. That is an effort to frame this discussion in a way that nobody else is framing it. It is an effort to frame it as people being either pro-migration or anti-migration. That is not the discussion that is happening in households across the country. People are talking about the volume, the rate and the numbers in respect of this issue. It is important that people understand that. We have many migrants in our party, Aontú. We put many of them up for election and many of them have said they disagree with the Government's policies over the last while. They want restrictions on the numbers of people who come into the country. They want that figure to be lowered and I think they are right. We have to lower those figures if we are going to have a sustainable situation in this country into the future.
It was mentioned that we need these workers, and we do, but we also need to look at what is happening with the birth rate. In 2009, there were 75,000 births here. Last year, there were 55,000 births. If this trend continues, we are all going to be working until we are 85 and pensions are going to be reduced. There will be no balance in the demographics to be able to fund society in the future. We will have to work on that issue at some stage.
The European migration pact outsources key decisions to Brussels. It reduces the ability to take sovereign democratic decisions in Ireland. It locks us into policies and decisions that will be made by other countries in their interests. It is a massive transfer of sovereignty. We do not know what the future holds but if we can self-determine, at least we can control the costs and the numbers in future. If we hand away sovereignty, decisions will be made in Brussels and we will not be able to determine our future contributions in relation to this matter.
A question came up during an earlier debate on the Bill, which the Minister may be able to answer. Will the Council of Europe be able to change the parameters of the EU migration pact in future? Will decisions on the numbers that countries should take and contributions they will have to make in future be taken by the Council of Europe on the basis of a qualified majority vote? If so, we are stuffed because that is a blank cheque. We know exactly what it means if we hand over to the European Union the power to fine Ireland. Look at the situation with greenhouse gases. We are hurtling towards binding 2030 targets for emissions, with hundreds of millions of euro of fines. We handed over qualified majority voting on the Mercosur deal and a decision on our beef industry was taken on the basis of German, French and Italian interests. This is another example showing that when you hand over power from this House to Brussels, decisions are not always made in our best interests. The Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, has said that he does not believe in the old-fashioned idea of sovereignty. The current Fianna Fáil leadership is millions of miles away from the revolutionary generation of Fianna Fáilers who fought for independence in this country.
There are major costs wrapped up in what we are looking at. None of the positive elements of the EU migration pact could have been entered into voluntarily by us without signing up for the pact as a whole. There is nothing about the timelines, the numbers or the reforms the Minister is making that could not have been achieved based on the democratic will of this country and without having to hand away sovereignty. Let us remember that, nine times out of ten, the decision you will make for yourself will be better than the decision your neighbour will make for you. The same applies to countries. We still have a generation that is suffering from the massive cost of the banking bailout, when 1% of the European population was made to pay 44% of the cost of the banking bailout because Europe worked in its best interest and against our interests.
Aontú will oppose the Bill and push back against it. We will look for a migration system in this country that is compassionate and fair but is far stricter than what we have seen so far.
