International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-18
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Gary Gannon (SD), Dublin Central

I am conscious that in 2020 a UK-Ireland returns agreement was signed that was challenged in the courts on the Irish side and found to be at best legally dubious, so it has not used. The Government updated it in 2024 or 2025 but the UK side has not enacted it at all. We are effectively going to have an International Protection Bill that is a transposition of EU law, which is absolutely fine as a theory, but I will be voting against it. We then have a shadow immigration scheme the Minister of State assures us is operating at an official level but that we cannot have oversight of and that we do not know where jurisdiction applies as to who is intervening on either side of the Border. Absolutely none of us wants to see any erosion of the common travel area at this point but this seems like a fairly significant gap and it has not been explained at all.

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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