International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed) and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-25
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Jennifer Whitmore (SD), Wicklow

Last week, I sat in and listened to much of the debate on this particular amendment. I agreed with a lot of it. I agree that Government made an absolute mess of this entire issue. There was a lack of preparedness. The Government did not take on board repeated warnings and repeated recommendations as to what it and the country needed to do to house and process asylum seekers. I absolutely agree that what the Government has done is to funnel huge profits to developers rather than build the public services and public facilities that we need. I agree that the lack of communication we have seen caused huge problems in communities. It could have been handled much better.
Once an IPAS centre went into an area, there was a real opportunity to bring in supports for that area, but that did not happen. That certainly would have assisted.
A lot of the difficulties that we saw within communities were fuelled by the Government - public representatives who did not back the Government's policy and spent most of their time out in communities arguing against it and creating division. They really did not show any leadership in this. There was also a big problem with misinformation, whether online or in public forums. That was never countered either by the Government or by those public representatives. There were a lot of problems in how the Government has handled the issue.
There was a lot in what the Sinn Féin representatives said last week. When you are trying to communicate something, you do not just communicate by what is written down and what you actually say; you are communicating by your tone. You also communicate your message by what you do not say. What was not said last week by Sinn Féin was that in many areas the communities came out and supported those centres and they really got behind them. If I was someone who had been through the asylum process or who was currently in the asylum process, the impression I would get from TD after TD who spoke on it was that having asylum seekers in your community is the worst possible thing to happen to a community. That is the message I would have picked up from what Sinn Féin was saying. It was being seen and represented as a blight, putting huge pressure on communities. What Sinn Féin failed to do was to understand that, in many situations, a community can take on and really open their arms to people within the asylum process and to IPAS centres. If I look at my own county, I see the number of people who were quietly, often secretly, working in the background because they were afraid when there were really heightened tensions in the community. There were so many people working quietly in the background providing English classes and lifts, collecting clothes, and setting up the Sanctuary Runners.

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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