EU Regulations: Motions
Dail Éireann — 2025-11-26
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Niall Collins (FF), Limerick County

I thank all speakers who contributed to this debate. If you listen to the range of contributions, you will hear wide and varied differences in the views and opinions being offered. For me that reflects the complexity of the whole issue of immigration and migration. There are very little solutions and lots of criticisms, which I can accept but it is the job of Government to try to manage migration and immigration.
Before doing so, I restate that immigration has had positive benefits for Ireland. Both I and the Government acknowledge the great contribution migrants have made to Irish society. I reject some of the characterisations of actions and decisions by Government to try to deal with and manage the issues. Our strategy will have to look at our future needs over the coming decade but we still want to see people migrating to Ireland.
We cannot ignore that our population is increasing at a significant rate. Our population is growing at approximately 1.6% per annum, which is seven times the EU average. We need to try to slow down that rate of increase. Last year about 185,000 people entered the country. They entered the country, migrated into our country or returned to our country. I will give a breakdown. Approximately 12,000 of the 185,000 were on employment visas, 32,000 were people who came to work here from other EU countries or the United Kingdom and 60,000 people entered on student permits. We had approximately 23,000 people through family reunification. We had 18,500 people who claimed international protection. We had another 10,000 who claimed temporary protection and we had approximately 30,000 people who were Irish citizens returning from abroad. That is just to give context and a backdrop.
On the three motions I moved and spoke to earlier, we are already participating in and benefitting from these EU funding streams. Government has no hesitation commending the motions that we opt into these proposals which are laid before the House. By doing so, under an Article 3 opt-in it will ensure that we are at the table with our European partners involved in the detailed discussions from the beginning. I remind any Deputy with reservations on parts of these measures that they are at the initial stages of discussion. Officials from my Department will be working closely with their counterparts as the work progresses to tweak aspects to better fit with our system. I commend the three motions to the House.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-11-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:22+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-11-26