Regina Doherty

Fighting over whether I voted with the right, whether I voted with the left, what we did was we found a common ground within the European Union.

And I'll also remind listeners, so did the European Council, where an awful lot of S&D prime ministers sit, particularly Denmark, for argument's sake.

We found a common ground to find a solution to respond to the people that gave us the mandate to be sitting in the EPP, to sitting in the European Parliament, to respond to a crisis where we have a system where people don't have any trust in it anymore.

The most important thing we can do is to have a fair, firm and responsive system that looks out to the people that we protect, but it's also fair to the citizens of the nations that we represent

that it is also enforceable where people don't have a legal right to stay in our country, that we have a mechanism to be able to remove them.

I don't believe so.

So first of all, the political engagement that goes on between the Irish government and the undocumented in America...

is the right thing for us to do as a state.

The problem is, is that an awful lot of people who come to the European Union, we don't have relationships with the countries that they come from to have those political engagements.

What I know, when I was sent to the European Parliament, is that more than half of the Irish people think that migration is one of the most pressing issues that we have and they want us to address the issue with solutions.

That's what my party has done over the last number of years, is to negotiate solutions that gives a fair, firm and enforceable migration system.

And to cut a lot of nonsense that Éanna said, this is not about stopping anybody from coming to work, to live, to study in the EU in a legal way.

This is about our asylum process, which in a lot of countries has been overwhelmed in the last number of years, to find a way that when you're at the very end of that legal process, because you're allowed to apply for asylum for any reason in any country, at the very end of that legal process, if you've been refused

Surely to God, it isn't reasonable or unreasonable to expect us to have a uniform way to say, I'm really sorry, you don't have a legal basis to be in this country.

We're going to have to remove you.

I didn't say it was fair.

What I'm saying is, is that we have a route to politically engage

on behalf of Irish citizens living in America to try and actually formulate something that's legal to settle those people in America.

That's an ongoing engagement and you know it's been going on for generations.

What we don't have