The interests of morality would be better served if a substantial amount of the €300 million spent annually by the State as a result of asylum-seeking in this country went instead to overseas development assistance, the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, said during the concluding stage of the Seanad debate on the Immigration Bill, which was passed.
There were also people in Ireland who were not getting these resources because they were being put into this particular area, he said.
Rejecting a Labour proposal that asylum-seekers be given extra time to explain their non-appearance at application hearings, the Minister said those who came to this country, which devoted such huge resources to giving them and their dependants fair play, should at least co-operate appropriately with the system that was in place here.
Moral issues were involved in the amount of Exchequer funding on the asylum issue, and the morality did not go all one way. There were some people who stood up in public and who thought they were girdled by the garments of rectitude because they supported asylum-seekers, Mr McDowell said.
But it could not be argued that people who came into the system and who behaved in a cavalier way were then free and easy to walk away from it, he added.