SPIRASI 2007 Summer Graduation

Welcome to Minister for Integration, Conor Lenihan T.D.

Speech by Killian McMorrow

On behalf of the Board of the Spiritan Asylum Seekers Initative, I am delighted to welcome you here today to this graduation.ceremony. SPIRASI is also very pleased to have the opportunity to congratulate you on your appointment. It is a significant matter of history that our country has appointed a Minister for Integration and a considerable acheivement for yourself that you should be the first hold the office.

We do not doubt that you can undestimate the task that you face. The results of success can be wonderful, but the cost of failure catastrophic. SPIRASI takes very seiously and concientously its role as an informed source of understanding of the issues which integration raises and we hope that you will accept the assistance in this which we can offer you ; as we undertake to listen to what you expect of us . Our understanding is founded on the direct and practical experience of providing services to those persons seeking asylum, accepted as refugees or migrant workers from outside the European Union ; in addition to continuing research , reflection and discussion.

Since 1999, we have identified education as a priority for the many persons who seek our assistance and today’s graduates are the latest products of a process, which has aimed to equip these newcomers to our country with the skills to integrate here. Hence the devolpment of the Centre for the Education and Integration of Migrants at SPIRASI. It has been possible to place many of the courses provided by CEIM in the framework of the FETAC awards, with benefits to all concerned.

SPIRASI must address torture, trauma, isolation and fear as a matter of course in its daily work at the North Circular Road and elsewhere ; so we are aware that graduation likely represents something very much more than academic achievement for the succesful student. Now they face a greater challenge however and at present for some it is insurmountable. That is to make their contribution to Iirish society, for which they have so earnestly prepared themselves.

Everybody wants to pay their way in life. The right to work for those seeking asylum or otherewise resident in the state awaiting status decisions is a measure which can have a transformng effect. It will significantly reduce the cost to the exchequer of the asylum process; it will release a flexible body of able,willing and often skilled workers into the employment force; it can address and overcome the evil of the black market in labour and it can return their dignity to many persons; whose faith in our nations values was what brought them to these shores.

The main social partners, I.B.E.C. and the I.C.T.U. have voiced support for this policy. And the good news Minister for you, as a legislator, is that, as you probably are aware, the policy comes largely ready made, courtesy of the European Union!

European Council Directive 2003/9/EC of 27th January 2003 — ‘ The reception directive’ — has been the basis for at least nine E.U. countries allowing access to the labour market , including in the case of Spain and the Netherlands, within 6 months of applying for asylum and Austria, Greece and Finland within just three months of application for asylum. Allied to this, adoption of this Directive could facilitate an overhaul of the direct provision and dispersal policy , which is repeatedly being shown to be the cause of serious problems ; of illness, extreme hardship, isolation and marginalisation. That such can be the outcome of official Irish government policy we trust you find as disturbing and unacceptable as we do.

Ireland opted out of the Reception Directive in 2003, but we ask you to avail on the new government, to now opt into what are minimum standards, which have not been shown to have adverse effects for our fellow European countries who have applied them.

In this and in other efforts to achieve integration, SPIRASI offers you support, in a task which we are optomistic you can fulfill.

Speech made by Minister Conor Lenihan at SPIRASI Summer graduation

The following is the speech made by Minister Conor Lenihan at the SPIRASI Summer graduation on 19th July 2007 in Wynn's Hotel, Dublin. As he was not speaking from a script, the following is a transcript as transcribed by a SPIRASI member of staff:

Thank you very much for affording me this. It has been the first official invitation for me the first ever minister for integration appointed in Ireland. I'm very happy and proud to have accepted this invitation because it's very practical, it's very real and what we have on the room today are 150 people family and friends, the Garda Siochana, the HSE the UNHCR and of course the members and directors of SPIRASI, who are going about it in a very simple straight forward way, delivering the educational opportunities to individuals who come here to pick a life, to make a success of their ambitions and themselves and I'm very proud to be here today to present these certificates and to state that Ireland wants to be an integrated country.

Ireland wants to afford and give the opportunity to the new Irish who are coming here, the non Irish who are coming here to live work and play out their lives. Ireland wants to give a positive message of integration, and the appointment of me, directly by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, is a firm indicator that this country wants to get migration right and not repeat the horrendous and stupid mistakes that have been made in other countries - so-called sophisticated, European developed countries who have made a mess of their migration policies. We want to get it right; that's why I'm here today. And I'm open to all of your ideas and all of your contributions, because when I look down through this room today I see the citizens for the future. I see the tax payers of the future. I see the people who are going to bring Ireland into a new and very much brighter century, a century that will be more affluent, more open, more tolerant than the one that I was born into here in Ireland.

And that is the challenge for me and this ministry. How we, as a society, can move, evolve and change and how we can learn as Irish people from our own history of migration as a people, and I have said repeatedly since beginning this job that Ireland cannot afford to repeat and make the mistake that other countries have made with this regard. Ireland above all is a country that has promoted itself the length and breadth of the globe as a friendly open welcoming people. You can see the advertisements from our official tourist board literally this summer saying come to Ireland - you'll be greeted with smiles and 100,000 welcomes. Well, if you want to define what my new job is, it's exactly that, to make sure that that PR, that propaganda, that we tell the rest of the world is the reality here in Ireland when they come to visit us as tourists. That that is the reality, not just for the tourists who come for a one or a two week holiday but for those who come here for life and want to be part of our society, who want to vote in out elections, who want to contribute and want, like the lord mayor of Port Laois to be in charge of our towns and to help run our cities and run out small towns. We've seen what the mayor of Port Laois can do, but one small move. He's elected, he's integrated himself and he's spreading the integration message. That's my job too and I think it's hugely important from an Irish point of view, it's hugely important given our own history of colonisation, our own history of famine and I'm more acutely aware of this because in my previous job I worked on the Irish development aid programme, which is 80% focused on Africa, and I want to say to you, very very simply how I define my job as I go forward, when I travel to Asia, Latin America, Africa, specifically Africa, I had a friendly and very welcoming people that I met there. I want that to be the same for the people who are starting out life here as migrants in Ireland.

We have an opportunity over the next one two three years to get the structures right. First of all, the State, which is me the government, the minister. We have to get the structure right, if there are gaps in the structures if there are gaps in the system and they are disappointing or frustrating or preventing people from progressing upwards in our society, we must get rid of them. It's not just a moral argument about equality, it's an economic imperative. As we know, the facts and figures speak for themselves. The migrants who come here are in many, and in fact in the majority of cases, far better qualified than some of our own population. Not only that, a great many of the migrants who work and live in Irish society today are over qualified for the jobs that they perform within this society. And that is not good news, we must provide progression for all citizens and all people who live and work and wish ambitiously to succeed and go ahead in this country and that is my priority. That is my goal. I'm here to work for you and for our own Irish population, that they understand the changing needs of Irish society and the need for Irish society itself to change into this bright new future. So thank you very much.