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

Jim O'Callaghan (FF), Dublin Bay South

PNR is used for serious criminal activity. It is not used for international protection. Even if that was in place, we would still need to have a mechanism on the Border to check people. We must be honest and realistic about this. The Garda can do some stops in terms of stopping buses or checking individuals but in terms of using something like PNR, people would have to be checked as they go North from South or come South from North. No one in this House wants that. It is a really difficult situation we find ourselves in. Everyone may be able to identify the obvious solution is Irish unity. We do not have that.
I must deal with the reality of on the island of Ireland an open border with another non-EU country. It creates a huge challenge. If the UK was in the EU, many of these issues could be resolved in that the UK would be part of the returns regulation, which will hopefully be agreed, and there would be a mechanism for it to apply. One thing the EU has not been good at, which Deputy Tóibín mentioned earlier, is the operation of the Dublin III regulation. It does not work. At the first meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Council I attended, the German Minister for interior affairs emphasised that the Dublin regulation does not work. We need a new procedure.
That is the benefit here of what will be in this legislation and the subsequent returns regulation of which we hope to be part that will try to instill a greater and more efficient mechanism of stating that if somebody has applied for international protection in one jurisdiction already and they come to another, it is inadmissible and they have to go back to the first jurisdiction.

---

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