International Protection Bill 2026: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-03-18
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Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

I want to put on the record of this House, lest anybody misinterpret anything I say in the course of the debate on this Bill, that I do not morally condemn young men, in particular, from disadvantaged parts of the world who see in Europe the opportunity of a better life from an economic and social point of view. I make no moral condemnation of them, no more than we collectively made moral condemnations of our own nationals who, at times in the past, went to the United States, outstayed their welcome and became illegal there. It is perfectly understandable that these young men, in general terms, from west Africa, the Maghreb, east Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Vietnam, who live in those countries see an opportunity to come to Europe and to participate in the advanced economy of the European Union and to avail of the fact that the state in the European Union will look after them to some extent in a way which other states would not. I want to put on the record that moral condemnation of migrants, a term which I use advisedly, is not part of my thought process or my approach.
The European Union and its member states have put together an elaborate legal construct based on what is in Article 18 of Charter of Fundamental Rights, namely the right to asylum. The European Union has, and I use this word with a degree of cynicism, decided that it has competence in this area when it has proven generally that it has absolutely no competence in the sense that the ordinary person would give to that phrase. Where the European Union has created a legal construct which allows people to travel to Europe by one means or another, and then to claim asylum, it is almost inevitable that anybody who sees an opportunity, even if the odds are against them in the sense that the Minister says that the majority of applicants are now refused in Ireland, to get to Europe and be one of the 1 million people who Senator Keogan mentioned are seeking asylum status in Europe, it is perfectly understandable that they will do it. Why not? It is a good toss of the coin. They are more likely than not in some circumstances to succeed. I do not morally condemn people who see that opportunity.
If the Americans had a system whereby the Irish undocumented were effectively given a legal channel to stay within the United States permanently, the flow of Irish people to America in those years would have been huge. However, they did not. The Americans are more stern than we have ever been in relation to undocumented people and now things have got to a really appalling situation with ICE and the Trump Administration.
Those people who travel from Vietnam, west Africa, the Maghreb and east Africa are part, generally speaking, of a major international racket. They are asked for what for them are huge sums of money, thousands of euro, to begin their journey to Ireland or to Europe. They are ripped off systematically by gangsters the whole way whenever that possibility exists. In some cases, they are put to terrible risks like travelling in a container in which some of them are liable to be suffocated, or crossing the Mediterranean or crossing the English Channel in circumstances where their lives are massively at risk, all on the basis that they are paying to participate in this process. That whole illegal migration into Europe is a massive international racket. It is criminal and it is wrong. It is not to be condoned for one minute. The expectations, hopes and aspirations of those people who avail of it is one set of things but the terrible abuses of the people who are trapped in this process is another.
In the entire duration of this debate in this House, I hear the conflation of migration, the rights of migrants in international law and the fact that there are international commissions on migration on the one hand, and the people who are trafficked by criminals internationally. The conflation of those two sets of people is very easily done especially by those who wish to blur the distinction. That is a point that we find all the time in public discourse on this issue. On the one hand people, including me, would point to the positive aspects of migration, economic migration, providing it is lawful and to the role of the Minister's Department and other Departments in securing migration where it is needed for our social and economic benefit and on the other hand, to the whole process of asylum seeking.
The Minister has talked about the figures that went up and down over the years. I do not want to be unfair to the former Minister, Roderic O'Gorman, who is a Member of the Dáil. He told us at one stage about three years ago that we would have to get used to an asylum-seeking migration volume of applications of between 25,000 and 30,000 people per annum. That is what he said. The fact that it is down to 13,000 now is good because the great majority of it, as the Minister has said, is not justified. Let us be clear about it: the great majority of applicants who stay to have their applications dealt with are found not to be entitled to asylum status in Ireland.
My next point is we have a very sophisticated apparatus in this country compared with what I found when I was made Minister for justice in succession to the Minister, John O'Donoghue, in 2002. At that time, the State was utterly unprepared for the influx of applicants who sought asylum in Ireland. We were unprepared for it and were defenceless in many respects. We had not put in place procedures or agencies or the like to deal adequately with the fact that people were claiming asylum. In the meantime, let us also remember, we have spent billions of euro on the accommodation of asylum seekers, the majority of whom are not entitled to asylum. The public rightly asks what the procedures are whereby some people can become multimillionaires providing the State with this accommodation in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. However, let us be honest: the High Court, under the very estimable, respectable and highly gifted judge Mr. Justice Cian Ferriter, has recently had to award compensation, effectively damages, to asylum seekers who came here at a time when there was no accommodation available to them. They had to sleep homeless. We all saw what happened during that critical period.
The average citizen here wonders how it can possibly be that somebody who opts to come to Ireland when there is no accommodation gets compensated for the choice they make. How does that make sense? It does not make sense. It does make sense in one area, however, and that is legally. Mr. Justice Ferriter in a very considered judgment examined all the case law of – guess what? – the Court of Justice of the European Union and found himself driven to the point that in those circumstances the State, which had already said it was in breach of an obligation to provide accommodation but did not have that accommodation, must compensate people. It should be remembered that in that particular case the State conceded it was in breach of its obligations. The real issue was whether the non-availability of accommodation could give rise to a claim of compensation by people who were denied it.
I do not know, and I shudder to think, how many other people reading that fine judgment are consulting solicitors around this city at the moment wondering what they are entitled to for the fact that they spent weeks on the Grand Canal in tents and the like. I do not know what the result will be. The crucial thing is, and this is the point about the Sinn Féin amendment which intrigues me and I sympathise with it, that here we are being told that Ireland is a sovereign State and we are also, of course, members of the European Union but we have opted in to something that very severely compromises our sovereignty. The migration pact is a package that further cements the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg as the final arbiter of what the member states’ obligations to applicants for asylum actually are and what they are entitled to.
It imposes its own legal framework on member states when administering the law relating to asylum seekers. That is the point about the Sinn Féin amendment.
The reality is that Denmark was sensible enough to opt out of a considerable amount of the area of freedom and justice that came in in the context of the Lisbon treaty. Nobody has ever explained to me why it was that when the Lisbon treaty had brought into effect the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, it was considered that the right to asylum was something the Union could uphold. Why could the Union uphold this? It was a Union of member states. Nobody ever applied to the Union for asylum. They were applying to individual member states. I remember the Lisbon treaty debates and there were all sorts of discussions on everything from abortion to defence to neutrality. Everything was discussed at the time but nobody asked, "Hold it, what is the European Union doing writing into its fundamental law obligations under the 1951 Geneva Convention?" Nobody ever at the time said, "This is a disaster in the making". I have to say, I did not say it and I supported the Lisbon treaty. I never looked around the particular corner of that right to asylum because we were told at the time that this charter only applied where member states were applying European Union law. This is an important point. That sounded very attractive as a proposition, whereby if they were applying European Union law, well, all right, maybe there should be some charter of fundamental rights and freedoms.
In fact, that situation has dramatically changed. This is where the Sinn Féin amendment is of interest. We now find ourselves in circumstances where our sovereignty, to which its amendment refers, has been handcuffed by European treaties to this proposition that the European Union in a flourish of generosity said, "The right to asylum shall be guaranteed with due respect for the rules of the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951 and the Protocol of 31 January 1967 relating to the status of refugees and in accordance with the Treaty [establishing the European community]". The simple fact is that the European Union treaties are supposed to determine how the member states operate among themselves. The European Union is not a sovereign body. It is by no means entitled to advance the proposition that all member states must apply the conventions at all times in their dealings with outsiders. The Minister here said that he has the difficult role, and I accept it completely, of striking a balance between the rights of would-be asylum seekers, on the one hand, and the rights of member states, on the other hand, to look after different considerations. I accept that he feels this and I accept that he feels he is striking a balance. Senator Boyhan mentioned the instance of whether we allow family reunification at three years or two years and whether that is consistent or inconsistent with European law. I take the Minister's point that he is advised the change he is making is consistent with our rights under European Union law.
Apart from things like that, the reality is the migration pact is a further step towards the dilution of Irish sovereignty and the transfer of that sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Parliament and the final arbiters, the judges in Luxembourg who are accountable to nobody in the end. When you ask why somebody who chooses to come to Ireland to seek asylum, when there is no accommodation for them, becomes entitled to compensation from the Irish people, the answer is it is a matter of European law by which an Irish judge is bound.
The European Union should not have been given this competence. It should be a matter for each member state to work out where it stands on this issue. It was a mistake to give this competence to the European Union. I ask the Minister to forget about Iveagh House. When I was Minister for Justice, I was president for six months of the Justice and Home Affairs Council of the European Union. I found our diplomats kept on saying to me, "If you take that stance, Minister, you'll be isolated." When I went to the meetings, I then found that the other Ministers for justice and home affairs were with me 100% and there was no question of me being isolated.
I believe it is time the Ministers for justice and home affairs across the European Union got together and said to the rest of the European Council and its President that this system of asylum-seeking is not working out well and is not going to work out well. The migration pact will not stop what is happening in the Mediterranean or what is happening in the English Channel, and, therefore, across the border into Ireland. The time has come for the European Union to reconsider whether member states' sovereign rights should be restored to them so the Danes can do what they want and the Poles can do what they want.
The figures mentioned by Senator Keogan were interesting. Looking at the figures for applicants per head of population, we are not doing all that well. We are a destination of choice. It should go back to the individual member states to determine how they strike the balance. When a State like ours is in the middle of a housing crisis, to say an applicant for asylum is entitled to be compensated because he has voluntarily come to this country and found no accommodation available to him offends common sense. He did not have to come to Ireland. No matter what view you take of asylum seeking, nobody is forced to come to Ireland because it is difficult to get here except through the United Kingdom, and it is difficult to get there except through France and the rest of it.
It is about time the Government looked at Article 18 of this charter of fundamental rights and freedoms and spoke to the governments in Slovakia, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania - I am not talking about Hungary but I will include it - and Austria, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Finland, by the way, has 2,000 people seeking asylum and it has the same population we have. There is a lesson there.
It is about time that the governments of the European Union said that the so-called competence, which has been conferred on the Union, is not working out and that they want a radical rethink on this issue. I am not parroting Trump-like views on immigration. I am quite happy with immigration providing it is lawful. I am very happy with it. I believe there is a danger that hard-right racist thinkers equally like to conflate migration. There are two groups of people who like to conflate migration with asylum seeking - the hard right and the hard left. Truthfully, down the middle, we have to draw that distinction. I am just saying that it is about time that the governments of the European Union got together and said to the institutions of the European Union, particularly to the Parliament, for which nothing is good enough but to get more power, that the member states would make a better fist of asylum seeking, in particular, if their sovereignty was, as suggested in the Sinn Féin motion, restored substantially and if the European Union admitted that it cannot maintain the cohesion of the Union and, at the same time, make such a bags of controlling the abuse of asylum seeking, which is an economic and criminal racket operated at great cost to the people who are stripped of their money by traffickers. It is about time that we honestly said that migration is good, bogus asylum seeking is bad and we will not allow the abuse of asylum seeking to put member states in the position that we in this country have been put in. If we put it over ten years, how much have we spent on asylum accommodation? Is it €1.3 billion or €1.2 billion per year? That is €12 billion. We could build a lot of things with €12 billion and do a lot of things with that money, but we have put it into the hands of landlords, hoteliers and others around the country to no avail and to achieve practically nothing.
Finally, there is no justice in putting people into substandard accommodation. There is no justice in that, especially when there are children involved. What else can this country do when it is pumping resources into the hands of persons who are exploiting the shortage of housing by offering the State emergency housing at unconscionable rents?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-03-18/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:44+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-18