This is "a human tragedy that requires a determined collective political response. It is a crisis of solidarity, not a crisis of numbers." These wise words of Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General, go to the heart of the crisis facing European states and the European Union over how to handle the huge numbers of people seeking safety on this continent. Fleeing vicious conflicts in the Middle East and Africa they encounter exclusion, hostility and misunderstanding from the place they hope will give them refuge. It is high time for a collective response to this crisis based on human rights and European values.
Crises have often driven deeper European cooperation and so it is again in this humanitarian catastrophe. Following a summer dominated by deaths and rescues in the Mediterranean the refugee agenda is now dominated by another route into Europe - from Turkey and Greece through Serbia to Hungary, and for those who manage to make it through that country’s razor fences, hostile government and mobilised security forces, through Austria to Germany where they expect better treatment. As one Syrian graphically put it: “What will the [HUNGARIAN]police do with us? We have come all the way from Syria. Do you know what it’s like? All we want is to be allowed into Europe. Will they let us go?”
Confronted with such elemental desperation and determination to escape, mass drownings, suffocations in lorries, razor fences or detention camps do not stem such a movement of people. Far more effective means must be found to share the task of receiving them fairly in the EU, along with a much more focussed effort to help resolve the conflicts which have driven the flow. Germany and Sweden are the favoured destinations because these states have handled the refugee crisis most humanely, but they cannot do it alone. Demands from Chancellor Angela Merkel for a more equitable approach are backed up by the European Commission's reported plans for a quota system to allocate refugees.
Since the eurozone crisis has shifted power within the EU back towards the member-states from the Commission it has become more difficult to deliver such a change, despite the necessity to act collectively at a European level.
All the more is this true because responsibility for refugee reception and migration policy is so jealously guarded at national level. But free movement is a fundamental feature of the European single market too and the wider freedom to travel through the Schengen system is deeply valued by citizens everywhere. Mrs Merkel correctly points out that “if we don’t arrive at a fair distribution then the issue of Schengen will arise - we do not want that”. A serious conflict of rights and values is involved which must be resolved politically by deciding which should have precedence. Otherwise this crisis will undermine the common approach on which integration is based.
Ireland, like other EU members states is challenged directly by these events. We should prepare to accept a substantially larger number of refugees and participate actively in the search for a political resolution of the issue.