Regina Doherty
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
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Not probably exactly.
And what this is and what was agreed on Tuesday night is the final part of years of negotiations of a new coordinated migration pact.
And I think they left, obviously, probably the most difficult part of it until the end.
And it is about what you do with people
When they've gone through the entire legal process and get a negative response at the end.
And what we know over research of the last number of years is that one in five people, when they get that piece of paper to say you're not legally entitled to stay in Ireland or the European Union anymore, leave.
But four in five of those people don't.
and they either abscond or they go into the invisible community where, you know, they live and work in the black economy.
Either way, it's the part of the process that have people has undermined trust in the last number of years.
And so what we need to do is to have a coordinated approach as to how we deal with those four people who were refusing to leave on their own.
But actually what that means is number one, every one of the 27 member states has to have the same rules and apply them evenly.
But we also have to have deals
for want of a better way of putting it, with the countries to be able to return them to.
Now, the reality is that with an awful lot of countries, we don't have a deal.
Afghanistan is one in point.
Now, actually, personally, I don't think it's a safe place to send anybody back to, but just using it as a case in point, we don't have a legal way of sending somebody back to Afghanistan if they've come here and we've decided that it isn't, you know, legally possible for them to stay within the EU.
What the Migration Pact does and what we agreed on Tuesday night, it gives us a uniform set of rules to talk about how we return people who've at the very end of a process have got a negative.
You're not allowed to stay.
So what we do with you and how we do it.
So effectively, now that wasn't part of Tuesday nights, that was part of a previous agreement.