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

Gary Gannon (SD), Dublin Central

I do not expect the Minister was watching the justice committee meeting yesterday but I will give him a relevant sentence from the Free Legal Advice Centres: "Ireland’s system of civil legal aid may go from crisis to collapse altogether". It stated that would arise specifically from the implementation of the EU migration pact and its transposition. Yesterday, we heard the Legal Aid Board was on the point of collapse. That is the urgency that is required. Will the Minister confirm, because he did not do so previously, whether legal advice will still be available at first instance to applicants?

---

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