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

Too often during this debate and for the past number of months we have heard this will be looked at and this will be assessed. There is very little confidence about the manifestation of those words as something tangible we can look at and scrutinise to see how it fits into our laws. It is one of the reasons this Bill is almost designed to fail. I am going to stick with the figure of 84% of people who claim asylum in this area doing so through the common travel area. I am sticking with that without evidential basis other than the fact I have a heard a Minister say it even though several other Ministers have given a different figure. This is the scandal with this Bill as it stands because we share a common travel area with Britain. A returns agreement between Great Britain and Ireland signed in 2020 proved to be worth no more than the paper it was written on. It was challenged in the courts from the Irish side within a couple of months and it fell down. New regulations were brought in in 2024-25 and the British side just said they were not applicable to them and they would not take any more returns. It makes a nonsense of this whole Bill that there are no answers to this very significant question. My fear, which is probably different from those of others in the Chamber, is that this will fall down and we are legislating for places of detention, including for children, and we have no answers to the fundamental issue that if a person claims asylum here, who we have established came through the common travel area, there is no means by which he or she can be returned and therefore we will have a detention system with terrible consequences. I will continue to reiterate that our country's history of institutional incarceration means we should be treading very carefully. Rather than doing that, we have this Bill, which is scheduled to be law by 12 June. I appreciate this is not the Minister of State's fault in a singular sense but it is grossly irresponsible of all of us to continue with this Bill given the gaps in it.

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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