Mattie McGrath urges tougher airport checks and faster deportations

I welcome the measures you announced today regarding housing, especially with our local authority, being empowered to buy more houses, but in the context of this test, we just cannot keep pace, and I do also want to thank Minister Alistair, Dr Shoseph O'Wren, he met me recently and went through some issues that were outstanding, and there are many issues outstanding and out there in the public domain, and people have real issues and real concerns about how we are going to handle the inward immigration, and indeed the two separate issues was concerned about the Ukrainian refugees from the war and our influx of inward immigration, and I am asking really about security at airports, and I am not, to knock them up and throw away the key mention, but I am just, people are genuinely worried, I have very worried, I have questions that I received back last year from the Minister of Justice, and they are worried about the people that have come in without any documentation, I know I have got some kind of answers that maybe they had false documentation to escape some repressive regimes in their countries, and they got rid of that rather than have poor documentation, maybe they should have none, but really the question about how how are we effective border controls at our airports and ports? Thank you very much for your questions. Last week or the week before, Minister Harris and I had a meeting with the GNIB, the Guard and National Immigration Bureau, and also the Border Management Unit of the Department of Justice, specifically to discuss some of the issues raised by Deputy McGrath, how we can improve our border security, and make sure that people who should not get into the state are not able to get into the state, and we have a very close cooperation with the United Kingdom authorities, in relation to the United States. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. and that is at least in part down to the fact that the Gardaí are stopping more people coming off the planes to check their documents, which means they can be kept on the plane if they do not have documents, and also they have been going out to airports in other parts of Europe where people often fly into Ireland from, and as a result of that, that has helped to reduce significantly the number of people arriving in our airports and then claiming international protection without any documents and so on. I want to thank the Gardaí in particular for their work in that regard, and also the airlines who have responsibility here as well not to let people onto a plane unless they have the right documents, but they are now seeing or they believe it is never possible to know for sure an increase in people coming from north to south, people coming from Britain or Northern Ireland into the Republic and seeking international protection here, and what we are not going to do is start doing whole-scale checks with people crossing the border from north to south for all sorts of reasons that I do not think I need to explain to the House, but it is an issue. I think it is one of the ways we are going to have to cooperate much more closely with the UK authorities to make sure that there are fewer irregular arrivals to Britain and Ireland because we form a common travel area, and it is definitely something I want to discuss with Prime Minister Zunak in the near future. They also update me on deportations, about 600 deportation orders issued in the last few months, and they are working on increasing the number of deportations to countries of transit and countries of origin, and bear in mind these are people who have applied for international protection and have been refused it because they were not entitled to it essentially. Their story did not check out or did not meet the standard that we set for people to get international protection. What they pointed out to me very clearly is that even countries that do large numbers of deportations, it is very hard to make deportations happen and you can only ever do a certain number, but it does have a very important deterrent effect because people believe that if they come to a country, claim international protection and have no prospect of being deported, that that will increase the number of people who come here invalidly. That is why it is important that we have deportations to send out that message to people, that if you need international protection, if you are a refugee, you are welcome here, we will provide you protection, but also to be firm as well, that if you are coming here with a false story, you are coming here on false pretenses, that you won't be able to, through various different mechanisms, stay here for years and years and years so that you can acquire some form of status, that we will issue deportation orders and we will effect those deportation orders. We do not have a cabinet committee on immigration. It is dealt with either through the Ukraine humanitarian committee or through social policy. I know the non-payment of a lot of hotels and accommodation providers is a big issue and certainly when we are asking them to renew their contracts, it does not help if we have left them in arrears and acknowledge that that is a problem. It is improving. Additional staff have been provided to the Department of Children and integration to help with that and also they have outsourced some of their processes to contractors, which has helped a lot too, so I think we will see significant improvements in payments to hotels and other accommodation providers in the next few weeks and indeed it is improving already.