Letters

Asylum and migration policy

Absence of leadership

Tue May 23 2023 - 00:15

Sir, – We constantly hear Government and immigration agencies alike saying that Ireland has international legal obligations to look after anyone seeking asylum in Ireland.

While that may have been the case then such obligations were committed to, it is likely that those obligations meant a reasonable intake of those seeking asylum, and not an obligation to respond to what is clearly by now a permanent and ongoing global crisis with no end in sight.

Most decent people want to help as many people as possible arriving on our shores but when such an obligation involved the erosion of our own daily lives, it is going too far. When such an obligation means our tourism industry is severely hampered; and when the Government can feel the freedom to say there will be no cap on the numbers they will seek to help – then it has gone too far.

It is not unethical, immoral or racist to say this. It is an acknowledgment that our obligations where signed up to in less extreme times, that there are limits to what we can offer, and that ordinary people in Ireland should not be feeling the direct negative impact of immigration in going about our daily lives.

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I am personally in favour of helping as many people as possible but I am appalled at the sloppy management of this by our Government; and I am even more appalled by the lack of will by decent leaders across the globe not to knock their heads together to help troubled part of the world even more; and to get despot leaders out of power as a matter of global emergency – so that people in their millions do not have to flee their own country to begin with.

We are standing by and doing nothing to solve that one. – Yours, etc,

KEVIN NOLAN,

Rathfarnham,

Dublin 16.