International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed) and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-25 ============================================================ Ruth Coppinger (PBP), Dublin West In here last week for several hours, a number of TDs took up the Government on some egregious things that it is bringing in, particularly in relation to children being detained and some really negative attacks on human rights that this Bill represents. Regarding this amendment, I cannot support it as it is currently worded. I do not agree that before any accommodation is provided for the IPAS services that there would have to be this, this, this, this and this. For example, there was an IPAS centre in Blanchardstown. Nobody even knew about it. It was working perfectly well. The people there were working with the Blanchardstown Tidy Towns on a Saturday morning making the village look good. It was an outlet for them. They were trying to integrate into the community. The far right councillor in the area got word of it and whipped up a storm. This is a recipe for the far right to build in areas. It is disappointing to see this coming from Sinn Féin. The party knows that this would be a recipe for creating new far right councillors, to be frank. It is not just that, we should have a discussion about community engagement. I have no issue with that because there has to be a level of community engagement. To suggest that this would have to be done before any new accommodation could be provided is adding to the negative feeling around any international protection applicants. I raised a case last week of an international protection applicant. They were people in a local Blanchardstown hotel. They were being moved to Mayo. I raised it with the Minister. To give an example, the woman whose case I raised whose child has special needs actually had a major panic attack. She is also diabetic and became so ill that she could not be moved. She ended up being transferred to Dublin. What I am saying is that there are real live human beings and families, ordinary people from other countries, in international protection. This just further demonises people. The Government is responding to the far right by moving in a much more overtly racist direction but other parties are also responding in different ways. How to take on the far right and racism is the most important political issue in the world right now bar none. We have to call it out wherever it is. This amendment is a recipe for stoking up fear in communities. We do need discussions and community engagement of some kind. You could have discussions with different groups and different individuals in a community but to suggest that no IPAS accommodation can be provided for people just adds to the racism and fear that is operating in communities. I have a couple of things to say on this. On its own, this amendment could look quite innocent but I have seen a leaflet given out in Dublin Central that says that Sinn Féin will manage migration. To be honest, the leaflet uses some racist far-right talking points. It talks about profiteering. That is all a lot of Sinn Féin's speakers have talked about. I have heard them several times over the last week talking about people being made into millionaires and about global market forces deciding our migration policy. These really are far-right talking points. It is conspiracy stuff. There are words that are not mentioned at all in the leaflet. Racism is not mentioned at all in the leaflet distributed in Dublin Central. --- 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/2026-02-25/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:41+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-25