International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-18
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Ruth Coppinger (PBP), Dublin West

We should mark in the Dáil that we are talking about minors and children being detained in prison. Every day I wake up and put on social media and my jaw drops to the floor at the stuff that is happening in the world, especially in the US with ICE and so on, but there are things in this Bill we should mark as being in exactly the same trend. One of them is for the first time explicitly allowing the possibility of children being detained for their own good, apparently. Detaining children never serves the good of anyone. The Ombudsman for Children has called this legislation a lowering of human rights and asked that there be an explicit prohibition on children being detained. Instead, it is being put in as a possible option. The UN committee for children would also state the same. We have definitely come a long way since the Minister took over this position. It is not just him as it is a trend happening throughout the EU and western governments. Fair play to the far right for the impact they are having because we are actually talking about unaccompanied children potentially being detained. There are other things in the Bill in relation to children I will come back in on but we need to send a message out that this is in the Bill because it is a lowering of human rights standards, as the ombudsman has said.

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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