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

A point that has to be made for honesty's sake in this debate is that we are sovereign in relation to economic migration, with the sole exception of the right of EU nationals to locate here under EU law, which none of us is challenging or saying is wrong. The Minister and his colleagues determine whether we need more Third World people to come to Ireland to do the valuable work many of them do in our social services and the like. We will probably have to make decisions about construction workers in the fullness of time. We are entirely sovereign in that area. The point that has to be rammed home is that the EU has no capacity to say to us, "You must allow people in to be electricians, this, that or the other", or, "You must increase your workforce", or whatever. Nobody in the EU institutions or the European Court of Justice has the right to tell us what to do in relation to that. The Government decides that through departmental decisions. We are sovereign in that area.
The place where we are not sovereign is with regard to asylum seeking. We talk about the very carefully described migration pact. In relation to economic migration we are sovereign; we decide who gets into Ireland, how many people we need and how many people are welcome here. It has nothing to do with migration; this pact has everything to do with asylum seeking and international protection. That is what it is about. It has been described as a migration pact when, in fact, it is an asylum and international protection pact. Hungary, France and everybody in the European Union is entitled to say they need, because of demographics, X thousand people to come and work in their country. The German Chancellor once welcomed a million Syrians because she said they needed them. Whether she was right or wrong about that, she did it. We say this is a migration pact and a migration issue but it really is not a migration issue. It is about whether Ireland has control over the one area this all applies to, which is international protection - not economic migration.

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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