International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-18
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Peadar Tóibín (AON), Meath West

That is worrisome and it needs to be fixed. The other aspect to this is that to deal with this issue and not look at the 85% of people coming through Britain is a problem. We need to go to Britain and to the Government in London to try to work out a process that when a person wants to apply for an application for asylum here in Ireland, they do so when they move to the island and vice versa because there are flows in both directions. It is in London's best interest to be able to know who is coming onto their island and it is in our best interest to know who is coming onto our island.
One of the questions I often ask the Minister is how many people actually leave when they get a deportation order and the stock answer at this stage is we have no exit checks. The reason we have no exit checks coming into this country is that we have a Border in the middle of our island. The only way to actually resolve this whole situation is not with this particular Bill. This is only a minor part of it. The vast majority of it is regularising who is moving from the island of Britain onto the island of Ireland. That is not just a chuckle. That is not just a difficult situation that can never be resolved. It is a real fact that has to be dealt with at some stage by this House. It is bigger than this Bill. It is five or six times bigger than this Bill in actual numbers. That is one thing that pretty much everybody is missing when they talk about this issue.
The second issue here is we also need to make sure that we realise laws without enforcement mean nothing. I submitted a parliamentary question on the current law, the Dublin III regulation, shows that about 2% of the people who were entitled to return to other countries and who have applied for asylum in other countries initially were actually returned by this Government. Even with the laws the Government has, it is not implementing those laws. Creating new laws does not make certain it will actually implement them either.
In my constituency office at the moment, we have a lot of people coming into the office - who we are helping - who have applied for asylum first in Italy and are now in Ireland. Last year, it was people who applied for asylum first in Sweden who are now in Ireland. As a result of different countries doing different things with their asylum processes, there are shifts in the direction of people and people are moving as a result of different regimes' experiences throughout the European Union. It is really important there is some confidence given to people that where we have a law and a reasonable right to return people to the country where they first applied for asylum, that is actually actioned. That is not the case at the moment.
On the sovereignty issue that is at the heart of this particular Bill, that remains the case. Nobody knows the future but if you have self-determination on a particular issue, you can actually change your laws and approaches to deal with whichever situation arises. However, if you outsource that to the likes of the EU, you will not be able to manoeuvre as deftly to situations that arise in the future. That is at the heart of the difficulty within this particular Bill. There are good things within this and there are logical changes within this but most of those could be achieved by the Government voluntarily entering those aspects of the Bill.

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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