Fine Gael’s immigration spokesman Denis Naughten has been accused by Integration Minister Conor Lenihan of whipping up anti-immigrant tensions. CATHERINE REILLY meets the Roscommon TD, sans race card...
SEVENTEEN months in, and suddenly a sea change. For over an hour at a Dáil café, Fine Gael’s immigration and integration spokesman Denis Naughten speaks knowledgably and passionately about a myriad of immigrant concerns – the crazy two-year waits for decisions on citizenship and long-term residency applications; the Government’s heel-dragging on a bridging visa that would have aided exploited migrants; the urgent need to improve English language provision.
Naughten is scathing of a Government he feels has patronised the immigrant communities by creating a ministry which, he says, has scarcely made a dent. “The reality is that Conor Lenihan’s job is a job in name only,” says Naughten in reference to the Integration Minister. “It was a PR exercise done by the Taoiseach at the time to actually pay lip service to the immigrant community.”
If Lenihan were serious, says Naughten, Dáil deputies wouldn’t be tearing their hair out looking for clear information on residency, citizenship, work permits and family reunification from Government websites often containing unclear and sometimes out-of-date information.
Denis Naughten seems genuinely scandalised.
Yet cast your eye on Naughten’s press releases since his appointment as Fine Gael’s immigration and integration spokesman in September 2007, and a somewhat different picture emerges.
With some notable exceptions, his media statements have been very negatively focused and, more pertinently, have seemed specifically designed to tap into anti-immigrant sentiment. Among them are: a call for an EU database to help identify immigrant criminals, the need to combat ‘sham’ marriages, a proposal demanding that criminal immigrants be denied PPS numbers, and a statement headlined ‘EU citizens have more rights than Irish under current immigration laws.’
All important issues, all headline grabbers, and all with more than a hint of Us and Them. Certainly, hard questions on immigration must be asked, but large, emboldened question marks surround the manner in which Naughten has chosen to do so.
It’s far from the more balanced and nuanced discourse in which the Roscommon-based TD easily engages during our interview, where he raises numerous bread-and-butter matters affecting immigrants – something he has only fleetingly managed since becoming his party’s immigration spokesman nearly a year and a half ago.
“I’m not trying to be negatively focused towards immigrants,” Naughten tells Metro Éireann, when asked about the tone which permeates many of his press statements. Yet it’s not the first time that this question has been asked of him.
In September, Naughten was among a trio of Fine Gael TDs singled out by Conor Lenihan for apparently playing ‘the race card’. Lenihan had said: “It is of huge concern to me that over the past few months statements have been issued from deputies Hayes, Naughten and now Leo Varadkar that are inflammatory and aimed at boosting their own profile at the expense of often vulnerable immigrants.”
The Integration Minister’s comments came after Fine Gael enterprise spokesman Varadkar had asked Fás during a meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment if unemployed immigrants could be given a lump-sum payment in exchange for going home. Spain had been operating such a system in relation to non-EU migrants.
“It didn’t make sense,” admits Naughten of Varadkar’s query, before switching blame for the incident to Fás. “First of all, Leo asked the question of Fás, and there was a very simple answer to that, in that the vast majority of migrants who are on our live register here are from within the EU, so the scheme that was introduced in Spain wouldn’t be applicable here anyway because the vast majority of migrants in Spain are from outside the EU. So it’s a completely different problem we have, or different issue that we have, here in Ireland. So it was quite easy to answer.
“I suppose Fás hadn’t looked into it, and maybe Fás should have been able to answer that question very simply at that committee meeting. I know that it blew up subsequent to that. I think it was a legitimate question to ask, and there was a very easy answer to it.”
He also insists that, contrary to any perception of Fine Gael being dismissive of immigrants, his party has championed greater protections for those who have been exploited. “Fine Gael was the party that pushed the bridging visa for undocumented migrants, which the former Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan accepted. We still actually haven’t seen that in place.
“You can’t have a situation where you are lobbying the United States to address the problem of Irish over there who are undocumented, who’ve entered the country – in the vast majority of cases – illegally, and then look at the situation here, where you’ve people who legally came into the country, were fully documented, and through no fault of their own fell out of the system, and are now being exploited or in a legal limbo at the moment.
“Since the promise last February – 12 months now – that the bridging visa would be put in place, the economic situation has changed dramatically... I really feel sorry for people who came into the country legally and have fallen out of the system. They are now in a desperate situation. Employers are hesitant about applying for work permits: one, because of the bureaucracy that’s involved, and two, because of the delays – even though I know that some of them are turned around quite quickly.”
As for Ireland’s ever-growing dole queue, Naughten says he has some alternative proposals to ‘goodbye money’ for the over 64,000 non-Irish nationals on the live register (of a total 327,861), a situation he says the Government should have acted on far sooner.
“We flagged this issue at the time of the quarterly national household survey published in June [2008], and it was clear from that that there was a problem that needed to be rectified,” says Naughten of the mounting numbers of unemployed migrants. “I think I was branded a racist by Conor Lenihan in relation to my comments – nothing new in that. It is an issue and an issue that cannot be ignored for two reasons.
One, says Naughten, is the untapped potential which rests within Ireland’s migrant dole-seekers, and two is the fact that a failure to act will result in fractured relations, destroying the integration that has taken place in towns through the efforts of native and immigrant locals.
He cites his native Roscommon, with its large Brazilian population, as a key example of good intercommunity relations.
“There are quite a number of migrants who are on the live register at the moment who, if they had English language skills, could actually get into a job far higher than the jobs they were actually doing,” he continues. “I have met them on a daily basis, people working maybe in Dunnes Stores who are qualified engineers, or whatever, and because they do not have competency in the English language they cannot compete for those jobs.”
Another problem, he adds, is an inconsistency in relation to recognition of overseas qualifications – especially those obtained in non-EU countries.
“I’d a case recently, a young man from Kenya, he was in college in Galway and had applied [to the National Qualifications Authority] for recognition of his educational attainment up to that. They gave him a level 7, but he appealed it and got a level 8. He says if he hadn’t appealed it he’d have been at a lower level. But surely he should have got the level 8 in the first place.”
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of immigrants are hoping to put down roots in Ireland through becoming a long-term resident or an Irish citizen. Such avenues are only open to individuals who’ve been legally working in Ireland for five or more years, but the average wait for both is around two years, and in this time the applicant may face difficulties getting a new work permit.
“They have to do background checks into individuals, I’ve no difficulty with that,” says Naughten of the Department of Justice’s assessment processes. “But if someone meets the grade and comes up to the mark, then there shouldn’t be any delay in actually processing that application. The quicker that application is processed, the more that individual and their family can be further integrated into the local community. And I think that benefits everyone.
“It’s really soul destroying to see families where they are living here for a number of years, where they have to judge whether a decision will be made on their long-term residency or their citizenship application before their short-term residency or long-term residency has to be renewed. And they are trying to juggle one system against another... they could fall out of the system, again through no fault of their own. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare.”
Naughten does not believe that anything sinister lies behind the inordinate wait, but that the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service – which belongs to the Department of Justice “family” – is under-resourced.
Overall, Naughten believes that Integration Minister Conor Lenihan has been found severely wanting on the most basic of issues, most notably English language provision.
“And that’s where the minister’s focus should have been at the start, rather than ‘Well this is my idea for this week,’ get nice photographs in the paper. But where’s the follow-through? Sadly I haven’t seen that to date from Conor Lenihan and the reality is that a lot of the decisions that have to be made are in other Government departments, mainly the Department of Justice, in relation to the whole immigration area.”
Naughten’s personal viewpoint, and one which he will propose to Fine Gael, is that an immigration ministry be created, with integration as one of its briefs.
“Integration on its own is pointless because unless the minister has a role in relation to immigration then I think it’s a pointless exercise. This is a personal view, but I believe that we should have a minister for immigration that deals with all aspects of immigration, integration, work permits, right across the board, programme refugees – everything to do with immigration should be in one Government department and at least then you’d have a one-stop shop in relation to this.
“ The system as it stands at the moment is a complete mess, and there’s absolutely no transparency about it whatsoever,” adds Naughten, specifically mentioning residency and citizenship decisions.
Another side to immigration is the asylum area. Naughten cites the rising costs of asylum accommodation as an issue through which he is trying to champion both “the Irish taxpayer”, as he puts it, and those in the asylum system, and suggests that change can only be initiated if the “Irish taxpayer” is sufficiently annoyed into demanding it. “You have to get the public on your side,” he says.
To underline his point, Naughten references the increase in asylum seeker housing costs during 2008, despite the drop in new applicants, commenting: “The fact that the cost of accommodation has gone up by €15.5m exposes two weaknesses: one, the lack of financial management within the Department of Justice, especially the agencies that are dealing with the whole immigration service, and the asylum aspect of it. And secondly, when you actually visit the asylum seeker centres and see the appalling accommodation that people are in, considering that we’re paying top dollar for this accommodation, it is a national scandal.”
He will not disclose which accommodation centres are appalling, but believes “quite a lot of them are poor quality”, and continues: “The reality is that a lot of the accommodation is quite poor yet there is a huge volume of very cheap, very affordable quality accommodation out there at the moment, and the Department [of Justice] seems not prepared to enter into new contracts.”
The spectre of setting-up asylum seekers in apartments at a time when people across Ireland – Irish and non-Irish alike – are losing their jobs would likely be controversial. Some might also suggest that it would attract bogus applicants.
“Well no, I don’t think it would,” replies Naughten. “We need to get better quality accommodation at a cheaper price, but at the end of the day what we should be doing is dealing fairly and efficiently with asylum applicants, and that isn’t happening under the present system, and I have serious question marks about whether it will happen under the new system as proposed by the [Immigration, Residence and Protection] Bill.”
One issue that Naughten has done well to consistently raise is that of the hundreds of young unaccompanied asylum seekers who have not been located since going missing from their accommodation – a “national scandal” which, he says, is not paid enough attention politically or socially.
Perhaps Fine Gael’s slowly growing brood of immigrant candidates for the local elections – six so far – will succeed in bringing migrant issues into the mainstream, and changing a party outlook which has to date propagated an antagonistic attitude.
Naughten, for his part, will be helping them campaign on the doorsteps.
