International Protection Bill 2026: Report and Final Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-03-25 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland I stand in support of both of these amendments. It is a very clear point in terms of democracy when you have vast areas of what is meant to be our collective decision-making process in the Parliament, including a variety of significant proposals with huge impacts on people's lives, that effectively are being pushed through at the last minute and that are not being allowed a guarantee of debate or proper time for discussion. We have had previous Bills on which the Minister has come in almost a dozen times but yet on this Bill, where again the timeline is June and July not April, it seems that the curtailing of debate is designed to avoid proper scrutiny. A huge number of proposals came through that were not subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny and were not discussed in the Dáil and that have then come through on Committee Stage - we had 70 pages of amendments - and now a large number of amendments have been brought through again on Report Stage. It is not just poor practice; it is abnormal practice. It is not normal, expected or proper parliamentary practice. As others have said, we are bicameral. The Seanad has a mandate and the public have a right, which is crucial. It is not just our mandate and our right to scrutinise it. It is our obligation. The public have an entitlement to have legislation that is going to be impactful scrutinised and properly laid out. As I said before, the decision to guillotine this legislation raises huge questions in terms of how the powers in it may be manifested and how they will be used. We cannot give the benefit of the doubt in respect of the many ambiguous powers that are within this legislation, if the legislation itself is not even being subjected to proper scrutiny and debate. I proposed this morning that this would be adjourned rather than concluded. I believe it was a wrong decision to force through the guillotine in this case. I also want to speak specifically in support of amendment No. 272, which looks for a report in relation to the legislation and in particular its adherence to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. That convention is a fundamental document but it is not just about the UN convention. We also made a collective decision through a referendum not that long ago that the rights of the child should be enshrined in the Irish Constitution. The rights of the child are not just something at the UN level; the State has put the question and been given the message from the entire public of Ireland that the rights of the child are something that should be respected in all points. That is why there is a particular onus on the Government to listen. The ombudsman is the person who is entrusted with reflecting those issues of the rights of the child, which again are not just there in the background but are fundamentally core to Ireland's Constitution and were chosen as a matter of such urgency as to be added to our Constitution by the Irish public. The Ombudsman for Children tells us that they are concerned, if the legislation is passed in its current form, that children seeking asylum in Ireland could be more vulnerable than ever before to breaches of their rights. I am going to highlight just one of the issues in relation to this. It is an issue which the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has also highlighted. Age assessments should only be utilised as a measure of last resort when there are serious substantiated doubts about a child's age. That is not the threshold in the Bill. Rather, an age assessment can simply be triggered by any matter that gives rise to a doubt as to the age of an applicant, by any civil servant, garda, immigration officer or even persons contracted under the Act to deliver its purposes or functions. Medical age assessment is a significantly wrong approach and has been found to be so by the UN Committee on Rights of the Child and marked as such by human rights and children's rights bodies. We are very concerned. We will have amendments which we may come to later. The approach to age assessment that is being set out in this Bill is extremely dangerous, damaging and deeply inappropriate. We will later press a specific amendment. That is the kind of issue that could be highlighted in this report, along with the issues we have highlighted otherwise, such as the idea that there would be individuals with responsibility for up to 30 unaccompanied minors, and that this would be the low level of support as children seek to navigate the system. I want to go back to the ombudsperson because it is really important. They are not just talking about a few inadvertent effects, what if a guardian is not good enough or what if the numbers are wrong, or even the specific issue I mentioned in respect of age assessment. The ombudsman is extremely clear. The fact of this being guillotined in the Seanad was mentioned in the letter as not being in the best interests of the child. Literally, it is not just bad for democracy but it is not in the best interests of the child when legislation which affects children is being guillotined. That in itself was a breach in terms of the responsibility to the best interests of the child. Crucially, they name the fact that this Bill will for the first time in Ireland make it legally possible to detain children who are seeking asylum. This is an abhorrent violation of their rights which can never be considered to be in their best interests. The ombudsman also goes forward to the fact of the system itself, that it a second-tier system. The asylum border procedure has this legal fiction which allows states to expand powers of detention and effectively act as if those who arrived in Ireland are in some limbo, not outside the law, not yet in the asylum-seeking system but in this pre-system, this system that is somehow outside of what your rights should be in terms of seeking asylum. That idea of a legal limbo that you place children into before acknowledging the physical fact that they are in your country and seeking safety - that very premise is in itself a deeply concerning step away from the rights of the child, and not just the rights of the child but of real children, who are real, who will be in Ireland, who are physically within our country and whom we have responsibility for. We are going to be placing them in a legal limbo where they may or may not be getting adequate care, may be subjected to detention and may experience fear and trauma that could be avoided. Those matters are identified by the person responsible for telling the State when it is making a mistake. I urge the Minister to listen to that and accept, at a minimum, an amendment that allows him to review how those mistakes may pan out over the period ahead. --- 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/seanad/2026-03-25/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:46+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-25