International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-02-18 ============================================================ Mark Ward (SF), Dublin Mid-West The Minister of State and I do not share a constituency but we do share the local authority area of South Dublin County Council. It houses the largest number of international protection applicants in the country with 4,200 in total. I have to say that some have settled in better than others but one thing they all have in common is that they are all with private operators who are making vast money from vulnerable people. An issue I have had from the start is with communication and consultation, how it is delivered and how people find out. It needs to be better because when it is not communicated well to people in our constituencies, it leaves a space for misinformation, bad actors and rumours. I will give an example. Any time there was a bit of work being done on a building, people said it would be the next IPAS centre. I will never forget that I had to stand outside the old Rowlagh credit union in Neilstown when it was getting done up. Nobody knew what was going on at the time or why it was being done up. Rumours were started and spray paint was being put all over the building to burn it out. There was all this kind of stuff that is not wanted in our communities. It is not with regard to my community but this is what was happening. It took me to find out what was happening. A much-needed GP service was coming into an area of high disadvantage. I had to go and speak to the doctor. He was from Kerry and was relocating his service into north Clondalkin. I had to stand outside and take a photograph and explain to people what was happening. My concern was that bad actors were going to come in and burn the place down. This was the direct impact of no communication and no consultation on the locations of IPAS centres. Citywest is also in our area. Communities and TDs should not have had to find out from national newspapers that the Government was going to purchase Citywest as a public IPAS centre. This is no way to do business. It caused a lot of hurt and anger in the area. Citywest will not be the last public IPAS centre that the Government will put in place but it has to learn from the mistakes that have been made already. The community engagement team came in after the fact and not during the fact. I have to be honest and say it has got better. The responses I am getting from the community engagement team are a lot better. I always say, and I have said it to the Minister before publicly and privately, that we need people on the community engagement team who have the ability to make decisions. Instead of going off and finding out information and coming back again, they should have the ability to make real decisions that will make a difference in our communities. The amendment we are speaking about is on a community impact assessment. It is about seeing what impact an international protection service would have, and what impact having more vulnerable people in it would have on the area. If we had a community impact assessment prior to Citywest, for example, we would have known there were issues in the area with a lack of gardaí, a lack of school places, transport and GP provision. There is no provision for public health nurses in the area. All of these issues could have been ironed out before the announcement was made and it would have stopped an awful lot of upset in the community. The Pobal deprivation index has to be key if other centres are going in. We must make sure we use the Pobal deprivation index. I spoke to the Minister not long ago. Parts of my constituency have gone backwards in the Pobal deprivation index. They went from being areas of high disadvantage to being areas of extremely disadvantaged in recent years. If consideration was being given to putting an international protection centre in these places on top of everything else I do not think it would be the right thing to do. The Pobal deprivation index should be considered by the Government. This is a very sensible amendment. It calls for an assessment of an area before something else goes into it. I would like the Minister to take the amendment on board. --- 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