International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed) and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-25 ============================================================ Matt Carthy (SF), Cavan-Monaghan I will come to that. The Minister of State should not worry. In respect of the debate, the Government decided the format of this debate. Because it tied us into the EU migration and asylum pact, in respect of which there was a deadline, everything else in terms of the consideration of this Bill has been put to one side. We are now in a situation where this debate is being rushed, guillotined and taken on the floor of the Dáil. The rules within that system are being adhered to. We have all been in situations when dealing with guillotined Bills where there have been amendments of ours or parts of the Bill we would like to discuss but we just do not get to that point. Those people who happen to have amendments they want to speak to earlier on cannot be blamed for that. Blame the Government. It is frankly bizarre that Deputies Jim O'Callaghan and Ruth Coppinger are making the exact same argument and saying that we should not talk about an amendment on transparency or community consultation because there are other things further down the amendment list that people would like to speak to. There are lots of issues in this Bill that I would like to spend time deliberating on. I submitted 50 amendments to this Bill across a whole range of policy areas. I would like to deliberate on each of them. In respect of this amendment, to be very clear, the contracts are set out on a per person per day basis. That is how the contracts are set out. The language just reflects that. The Minister of State can confirm that the contracts are usually set out in three-year terms. What this amendment is saying is that there would be a maximum amount that the Department would agree to for contracts in a given year and that new contracts would be reviewed annually. At the moment, the system is that a contract is signed for three years, and that is the contract in place. That is why we still have God knows how many situations whereby, as the Minister has acknowledged, there is overspending. It was mentioned that this could impoverish someone, but the only person it could impoverish it would do so by making sure that the people who pay themselves €4.6 million in profits might only be able to pay themselves €3 million or €2 million. They certainly would not be in impoverished by all of that. I invite the Minister of State to come back in, because he mentioned the rate card for 2024. This is a big Government scheme. Will he inform the House what the rates in the rate card are? He will not, because there is damn all transparency in this. He is telling everybody that there is a rate card and we are making great savings, but he will not actually tell people what the rate card says. Seriously. That is his argument for rejecting this amendment, namely, that there is a rate card that is hidden in a filing cabinet somewhere in the Department and that every operator of an IPAS centre knows what it is. The Minister of State knows what it is, but the people who are actually ponying up - the taxpayers – do not know what it is. There is no transparency in respect of this. This is such a simple amendment to ensure that a Minister would set a maximum rate and let the people who are footing the bill know what that maximum rate is. It is so simple that I find it hard to believe that we even have to have a discussion on this or the fact that it is not in place already. The rate card is a secret document. The Minister of State cannot tell us whether the rate card has been breached in the event of additional pressures. Has anyone gone above the rate card? We do not know. The Minister of State will not tell us. What is the difference between the highest and the lowest rate paid according to the rate card? The Minister of State will not tell us why there is a difference between the highest and the lowest rates on the rate card. He should not talk about the rate card as if Sinn Féin has conveniently forgotten that it exists. Sinn Féin has never been told what the rate card comprises. More importantly, the people who pay have never been told either. This is about transparency and recognising what emerged from an absolutely damning report by the Comptroller and Auditor General. I find the Minister of State's arrogance bizarre. There is a sense of the Government is spending the money, never mind how it is actually spent, we would not understand, the little people would not understand how the Government is spending the money, and it is doing all of these great things. The only independent appraisal of Government expenditure in this area was carried out by the Comptroller and Auditor General, an office for which most people would have respect. We could not accuse the Comptroller and Auditor General's office of hyperbole. If it says something, there is an issue. It has set out in very stark terms in a sample look at the contracts that there were huge issues - overspends and tax returns that were wrong, including VAT returns. I could go through the list again. We have that evidence. We have no evidence to suggest that all of those issues have been sorted out. The Minister was asked multiple times by Sinn Féin to carry out a review of every single IPAS contract. I do not see any reason for the Minister not to do that. Tonight, when we bring forward an amendment that simply says that there will be a maximum payment available under the terms of these contracts and that the Minister will tell people what that is, I would have thought that would be something that would be welcome because it would bring clarity and a little bit of transparency across the board. Deputies Gannon and Coppinger said they did not know what the rate was. I said what Sinn Féin previously set the rate at, but what we have said is that, under this Bill, the Minister would prescribe a maximum amount in regulations and that those regulations would be brought back to this House so that, for the first time ever, we would have a little bit of democratic oversight of how public money is being spent in this area. Is the Minister of State going to give us the details on the record? --- 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