International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-02-18 ============================================================ Matt Carthy (SF), Cavan-Monaghan We have a long track ahead of us. I want to put on the record that this is not how we should be dealing with this legislation. The Minister has described it as the most substantial piece of immigration legislation this House has dealt with in many years. The truth is that it is being rushed. It is being rushed not because it is emergency legislation. If it is an emergency, it is no more an emergency today than it was three or four years ago. It is because the Minister and the parties of Government have locked us into an EU migration and asylum pact and they are desperately now chasing to try to get legislation in place prior to the deadline for that pact, which is the summer, even though the Minister knows there is absolutely not a chance in hell within this year at all, at any stage in this year, that the Government is going to be in a position to adhere to the stipulations contained within either the asylum and migration pact or this Act. Therefore, it is deeply regrettable that we are not having detailed scrutiny within the committee. This is not the forum to have proper conducive discussions around the merits or otherwise of debates. We should be doing it in the committee. The Joint Committee on Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, which I chair as the Minister knows, agreed unanimously that we would make ourselves available at any time and for as long as it would take to actually go through each amendment in detail with the Minister. Instead, unfortunately, we are presented with legislation that is absolutely rushed. Literally within the last number of minutes, we adopted Second Stage of the legislation and now we are moving on to Committee Stage. The irony of it was that the Second Stage debate was still ongoing when the deadline for amendments to this legislation was reached. That is no way to carry out the legislative business of the House. It makes a mockery of the Second Stage process and of any semblance of democratic discussion taking place here. What is really frustrating from my point of view is that we are in a situation where we are being rushed and we have very limited time to scrutinise the amendments brought forward by the Minister and by other parties. It was only within the past hour or so that we got details of which amendments have been ruled in or out of order. I have great sympathy for the staff in the Bills Office who were run to such a short deadline. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-18/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:39+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-18