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

There are a number of things I could comment on but I am keen, as I am sure others are, to move to the many amendments we have to cover. There is one thing that needs to be said. It has been stated as if it is a fact multiple times that economics is the driver of asylum seeking. Even the Minister suggested that when we look at the figures, it is when our economy is good that asylum seekers come in. We need for context to look at what is actually driving asylum seeking internationally. The fact is that the figures from 2014 show that there were 59 million people displaced by conflict worldwide. In 2024,120 million people were displaced by conflict. In that year when there was a slight increase, again, very small numbers overall, which went down again last year, 2024 smashed records for the number of people who had been displaced through the horrors of war and conflict. It was described by the UN in 2024 as smashing records for human tragedy on a massive scale, with millions violently uprooted and struggling for survival as refugees and displaced people. The UN also noted that it was a failure and "a terrible indictment on the state of the world". In 2024, when there was that very small increase in the number of asylum seekers in Ireland, I do not think they were looking at the GDP figure and saying the economy is great and that they would all shop around. The fact is that millions of people right across the world were being driven into movement by escalations in conflict that we see every night on our televisions. We should remember, when we are disparaging the 1951 legislation and all of that, where that came from. It actually came from a point when humanity remembered, because they had seen it in the Second World War, what war is and what conflict is and what hideous things drive people into desperate situations. There is a suggestion that while there are some genuine cases, we are going to keep implying we know that most are economic cases and that the attraction is really our economic figures. Let us actually work with the reality that we have a world on fire and we are doing a tiny modicum of what we should be doing, and we should be doing it in a way that is decent. I am not going to get to the many other points I would like to because I would like to focus on our amendments. Those facts on displacement internationally need to be put on the record, however.

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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