International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-02-18 ============================================================ Jim O'Callaghan (FF), Dublin Bay South There are difficulties in policing the travel of people from both sides of the Border. That is unquestionably the case. However, it is not correct to say there is no lawful way of policing that. The Border management unit does work there. An Garda Síochána is engaged and if people are not citizens of the UK or Ireland, they are not entitled to cross the Border. I have to keep emphasising that. Simply because that is difficult to police does not mean we should change that law. It is an important provision that is in place. It is for the benefit of Irish citizens and UK citizens. I will briefly respond to the Sinn Féin point. At some stage, Sinn Féin will meet itself coming around the corner. We fought for years to have an open border on the island. If the Deputies are asking what measures we can put in place to ensure people are not coming across the Border who are not entitled to it, does Sinn Féin want hard infrastructure put up to stop people crossing the Border? I suspect it does not. We need to realise there are real challenges here for us because we have an open land border with a non-EU country. I want to ensure we have operations in place with the United Kingdom to make sure we have good co-operation between ourselves and the UK. I suspect what Deputy Carthy would like to see was that we have a returns agreement with the UK. That is something I will certainly engage on with the Home Secretary. It is dependent on getting the UK's agreement. The UK entered into an agreement with France and is clearly not happy with that agreement, which was referred to as one in and one out. If there will be any agreement with Ireland from the point of view of the United Kingdom, one thing I can guarantee is if it will take back returning people from the Republic to the UK, we will have to take back a similar number of people. We need to recognise the political realities of this and the fact we have an open border on the island. We want an open border on the island but it is important for me as Minister to keep emphasising that free movement across that border is for the benefit of people who are entitled to use the common travel area. --- 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