Government should dissociate itself from Healy-Rae comments - Quinn

The Labour Party leader has cal led on the Minister for Justice to "totally dissociate" the Government from comments made by the Independent Kerry South TD, Mr Jackie Healy-Rae, about asylum-seekers on RTE's Morning Ireland programme yesterday.

Mr Ruairi Quinn said the sort of "inaccurate and inflammatory comments" the TD had made would be "music to the ears of those whose only response to this difficult problem is to promote hatred and bigotry".

He felt it was particularly irresponsible of Mr Healy-Rae to suggest there were 80,000 asylum-seekers here. "This is four times the total number of all the applications for asylum made since 1992," he said, and the use of such a totally false figure would create unnecessary fears.

Given Mr Healy-Rae's position as an Independent on whom the Government depended for survival, there was an obligation on the Minister for Justice to dissociate the Government from his comments, he said.

The Socialist TD, Mr Joe Higgins, said Mr Healy-Rae's "sudden concern for the homeless and Travellers in need of accommodation in Kerry", as expressed on the same programme, "oozes cynicism from every word".

Traveller families would be "in deep shock" if they heard Mr Healy-Rae, he said, whose discovery that dozens of Traveller families needed accommodation urgently in the county had come after 40 years in Kerry politics.

Mr Higgins accused the Kerry TD of insinuating that asylum-seekers were the reason for homelessness in Ireland. "This despicable lie is merely a weapon to be wielded by an opportunist politician in a squalid attempt to preserve his political skin in a battle with his former colleagues in Fianna Fail in Kerry South," he said.

Repair work was continuing yesterday on the African-owned Infinity Ventures shop in Parnell Street, Dublin, damaged in an attack on Sunday night.

Refugees and asylum-seekers are invited to join a 12-day solidarity walk from Galway to Kerry beginning at Clonfert, Co Gal way, on Friday. It will finish with a bonfire and Mass on Mount Brandon on May 16th. The walk is organised by working groups from the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland in association with Trocaire.