Transcript:
Yes. I suppose we are into territory where people would, the first thing they would do is, the far left in politics would say that we are racist, but apart from that, the thing we want to do with our policy is very clear, we want to make sure that everyone in Ireland, everyone that is a citizen of Ireland is looked after, to the best of our ability. You touched on the brain drain as you call it, we have seen it with the nurses, we have seen throughout the nation nurses being trained up and leaving the country.

And then the situation where we are bringing in, whether it be asylum seekers or there will be refugees. Now everybody has sympathy for asylum seekers and refugees, but not under the system that we have.

I will give you a very very quick example. I asked it of me own council lately, to say, will we see something like 24 families of refugees, and I just said to the executive, surely that we will be involved with this in advance of them coming, surely they would have actually looked at the county to see where the housing waiting list, was there houses, was there schools, was there A, B and C. No, we were just told were getting 24 families and they are coming in on this date.

Now what is happening in the county, these are very small one, What is happening then is the people that are in Offaly, I know that we are in Wexford, are ten, fifteen years on the housing waiting list, lived in rented accommodation, poor accommodations, they would stay in their accommodations and the asylum seekers coming in, the refugees would be given new houses. Straight off. Will be given every opportunity for education, will not have to wait for an occupational therapist, will not have to wait like Ger talked about here and straight away they will just go straight up the line.

Now, I have no difficulty with them coming in, now the first thing that has to be looked after is the irish should to be looked after first and the rented accommodation that the irish are in at the moment, to me, I would see that the asylum seekers or refugees get those old homes and the irish get the new ones...

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We don't know what is coming into our country, surely if you're in the morning on the road, and I always use this example, if you go to Dublin or you're in Enniscorthy and see a homeless person, naturally enough you would feel sorry for him, you won't bring him home to your wife and kid and say
get the spare room ready. But yet you'd feel sorry for that person that is homeless but you wouldn't let him into your family home because you don't know what you are letting in. That is the way we are operating our country at the moment, and the minute you say that you want to control that, and vet that, you're racist.

Now what's happened is because the EU put so much pressure on the government, what they did is create the Direct Provision scenario, and what they're doing is instead of going through in 2015 where it was an eleven week process, that you either qualify or you don't qualify, if you don't qualify you're put back on a plane and you're sent back.

What we have now is they're prolonging that system and it's three, four, five years, ten years and its costing millions for people in direct provision. Now I feel sorry for people in Direct Provisions, because we should be giving them the opportunity, and this comes to your second point, in terms of if we are controlling who is coming in, we have labour shortages, if we have labour shortages, we should be able to select who we want to come into the country that is going to contribute to the exchequer, but more importantly, they contribute for themselves and for their families, and they can create a life, and that is the situation we have at the moment.

And it is just being thrown in and its going to get worse and worse folks. What is going to happen is, God forbid, in ten or fifteen years time, and this is what kills me more than anything, we have seen in this country in Ireland, giving away on everything that means something to us. Every value that we ever had is being taken away. We've seen that time and time again and we're only twenty years away from someone standing up and saying there shouldn't be a church up there or there shouldn't be this or we should have that because we had that in our own country, and you'll have groups of people in rooms like this lobbying to get something in this country that was in their own country but that is not of our culture and thats whats happening.

... I was on television with Mat Cooper and IDS and I was on radio and they're trying to say you're racist. I'm saying we're not racist, we just want to control who is coming into this country and I think that is a very very fair point.