International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-02-18 ============================================================ Fionntán Ó Súilleabháin (SF), Wicklow-Wexford Likewise, I think this amendment is helpful, constructive and sensible. To take a similar area in County Wexford, Rosslare was a really deprived village. It had two IPAS centres and was probably the most welcoming village in Ireland. It is the gateway to Ireland and Europe. People there raised over €100,000 immediately for the Ukrainian response and took in over 70 Ukrainians. It was one of the first villages to take in Ukrainians. What reward did this extremely deprived village get? It had the Great Southern Hotel, which was earmarked in planning to be a nursing home. The Pobal deprivation index shows the village has a very high percentage of elderly people, so people were waiting for this nursing home to come along. What happened? A developer flipped the property and said he was going to put 400 people into it. That was the plan. It caused absolute chaos in the village and there was cross-party opposition to it. I was delighted to march with the people down there, as were representatives from across the spectrum. People said if there was a wrong way to go about things, this was it. This was the reward the village got for being so accepting. People said we should spread the locations among the different counties and communities. As Deputy Carthy and others mentioned, the concentration has been in deprived rural areas and working-class communities. If we wanted a masterclass in how to divide an area and turn people against each other, this was a classic example. This amendment is a good, sensible option to take the heat out of this situation. I spoke to various providers. They said that five years ago, there was a rundown place with approximately 100 vacancies in it and they were getting €80 per place per night, or €8,000 per night. I spoke to a woman who said her brother was running one of these centres. He was getting €8,000 per night. The only requirement was to provide cornflakes or another cereal in the morning. It was basically a licence to print money. As Deputy Carthy mentioned, €1.2 billion was spent on this area last year. In the case of Rosslare, the village did not even have a doctor. We were saying we had to provide health services for people arriving into Ireland, yet there was no doctor in the village. Rosslare was being earmarked for a centre but, thankfully, people power stopped it, which was a sensible decision. I could mention several other examples around Ireland. The case of the 300-year-old Dundrum House Hotel in County Tipperary was another classic example. Brogan Capital Ventures Limited was involved. Again, this was a huge flashpoint. We all remember the scenes on TV of what happened at Dundrum. That could have been avoided. This hotel was the centre of the village. It was the centre for births, christenings, marriages, the afters of funerals and everything else. It was the only hotel in the village, and then someone decided it could be flipped over. It was vulture capital at work. The number of people being put in to that hotel exceeded the population of the village. It was a classic example. Last November, just before Christmas, the High Court ordered the centre, which was basically an unauthorised centre, to be shut down. It issued a quashing order in respect of the planning exemption granted to the hotel. That was another very good example, and vindication for the residents and all the groups. It was cross-party politics. I could cite several other examples, but I will not waste time. It was a masterclass in how to make money quickly for speculators and get rich quick cowboys and in how to divide communities. This is a really constructive, sensible proposal on how to take the heat out of this and go about it the proper way, basically, to do a community impact assessment based on the Pobal deprivation index, etc. Therefore, I plead with the Minister to at least back this. If he is not going to back the other amendments like earlier, he should at least back this one. --- 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