International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-18
============================================================

Peadar Tóibín (AON), Meath West

The Minister mentioned that people voted for European integration and co-operation. That is absolutely true but there has been significant creep in terms of EU control on a range of different issues in recent years. EU integration is not always a good thing. The EU often makes decisions that are not in our interests. The Mercosur agreement is a full example of that. The Minister talks about us making a democratic decision here. The Parliament on College Green made a democratic decision to wind itself up at that particular time. The question is: what direction are those democratic decisions pointing in? These are democratic decisions pointing in a reduction of our own sovereignty. That is the case. The Bill exposes this country to fines and costs into the future. I mentioned earlier the 2% successful return rate under the Dublin III regulation of people who were living here but who had applied for asylum in other countries. A reply to a parliamentary question by the Minister this week showed that half of the deportation orders issued by the Government are still not being implemented either in a voluntary fashion or an enforced fashion. The majority of deportation orders in this country are still not being implemented, which is an incredible situation. These are the weaknesses. Anther weakness is the Government is putting adult asylum seekers into children's accommodation, which is quite incredible and with devastating effects. Locking Ireland into these regulations with a clear history of Government inability to even implement the laws that exist will expose the country significantly to penalties in the future. That is a big problem and a big worry.

---

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