International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-18
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Aidan Farrelly (SD), Kildare North

I have tried to listen attentively to this. This has been a really interesting conversation over the last hour or so. I have mixed emotions on it, I have mixed views on it and I do not really know where I stand on it yet. Ultimately, proposed centres were never set on fire because of a lack of GP services, a lack of school places in a community or because the traffic congestion was too bad, and this amendment is almost a damning indictment of how Government has got it so wrong in the past. I am from a constituency where we have seen significant housing growth in the last 30 years. Our population in Kildare has doubled from 120,000 in the 1990s to 250,000 right now and I have yet to see a mobilised effort, a demonstration or a protest at any of the hundreds of housing developments that are proposed. That needs to be said tonight because, ultimately, the narrative and the discourse about what is before us tonight and what has happened over the last couple of years is the manifestation of an absence of political leadership, if I am honest, in all sections of this House. We have seen too many examples of where immigration and diversity is what makes us thrive as a country, but what we have allowed is a small cohort of people to blame the process and the mode of delivery as the rationale for racism.
With the greatest respect to my colleagues in Sinn Féin, I completely understand where this amendment comes from but when the State cannot even comply with its own planning legislation as enacted right now, I fear that an amendment like this would gather dust with haste because we have seen the State sign so many contracts with private providers in buildings that are not fit for purpose for anybody to live in, that do not have any sort of services - no running water, no heat, no electricity - and where we appeal that contracts are not signed for those services for those sites, people are ignored.
So much of the issue has been covered. The piece that I thought was a little ironic in this is that so many of us have spoken tonight about local issues that pertain to this amendment, about how communities have struggled because of a lack of investment over generations, but I wonder which of the communities we have spoken about tonight would pass through the stages of this assessment and be deemed okay to host a direct provision centre or an IPAS accommodation centre. When the mode of delivery is wrong, everything else that comes from that will always be wrong. We need State-run services. That is fundamentally a really important part of this. We need standards, we need quality but we need the State to comply with its own laws when it comes to planning permission in the first instance to ensure that where services are established, they can provide the basic amenities to those who will be living in them.

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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