International Protection Bill 2026: Report and Final Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-03-25 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland I will be brief because I am conscious of the many other amendments we need to get to but I want to indicate my full support for Senator Stephenson's amendment. The Minister suggested it is a pity if we do not get to everything. It is not a pity; it is a choice. We have spoken of one amendment at length, and what of the others? I did the calculation. What was allowed for was just over one minute per amendment. There is no way, in the way that this has been designed, that all amendments would be got to. We should not contribute to, not greenwashing but democracy-washing, where we suggest it is a little bit unfortunate that the debate ran out. The Minister loves debate so much and loves talking about the issues but time ran out. It is a choice. It is a choice to curtail debate. It is a choice to not allow for it. That is why what Senator Stephenson has done is to focus on some of the fundamental issues. Among the many detailed recommendations people have made, we have recommendations about receipts when people search people's possessions and recommendations about the detail of reception conditions. Those detailed proposals and ideas that people have put forward for making the law better will not be got to. It is appropriate then that we have had a discussion from Senator Stephenson on some of the core of this. Our human rights law might not have come from Mount Sinai, where others may take their direction while some of us may take direction from the international courts, but it comes from our learning. It comes from the Second World War. It comes from the knowledge of what went before it. The structures we have put in place within Europe and internationally in relation to international law come from an understanding, not from some naivety, "wouldn't it be nice" or an aspiration. They have come from an absolute understanding of the slippery slope of inhumanity and from a fundamental understanding of a quite radical idea which was not the idea under colonialism which many of these western liberal democracies participated in so freely for centuries. It is not the understanding of might is right, powers which exercise such cruelty and Germany's actions in the Second World War. It is not from that kind of understanding. It comes from the understanding - a radical idea - of all humans mattering, of human rights mattering for everybody and that we would set standards of how we treat our fellow humans. That is where the UN piece comes from. Then Europe has set itself those other standards to give leadership on what standards should look like because, of course, Europe has been the centre point of two world wars. On the European Convention on Human Rights, which also draws on the Geneva Conventions, the Minister may not like individual judgments and I may not like individual Supreme Court judgment rulings or every judgment from the European Court of Justice, but the way one engages with them is through the court systems, navigating them, setting new precedents and making better arguments. One does not come with this suggestion that it may be easier if they diluted their standards, that if the court systems diluted their standards, we may be able to meet them. That is not how things should be approached. We have heard at length of people not liking different judgments. I will not go into the Swiss case. However, let us be clear. The World Health Organization figures indicate that 23% more people die now directly because of climate change and heat. The assumption may be that we would not expect people in Europe to die. Is it that those people were going to die in other parts of the world and we would never have to see them? Is it not annoying that they are coming and taking cases in Europe when we know that that slight cushion of money we have in Europe should affect these directly known, factual consequences of the actions of European governments? That should not touch us because the effects should happen over there and we should not have to hear about it over here. However, what people realise is that the vulnerable in European society, be they older people, younger people or people on the margins, have a lot to lose by the attempts to chip away at our protections under the European Convention on Human Rights. They are making that stand in many cases in solidarity with the others who cannot take those cases. I passed every single day the men who were living on Lower Mount Street. They were living there as a choice. It was a choice that pandered to the far right. It was a decision based on a strategic messaging that said we like women and children refugees but we do not really like the men that they decided to stop accommodating the men. They made that choice. There was 100 at one time. It is not the case to suggest our poor State with its billions of surplus could not accommodate that when we see states across the world with nothing accommodating hundreds of thousands of refugees and giving them sanitation facilities and state-provided tents, if it is tents, rather than the idea that people could be given a €20 voucher and told, "Good luck in Dublin and, by the way, we need you here in another two days to report again." The fact is it is degrading to say that to somebody, and whether or not you like that individual case, and it was a very cherry-picked example of somebody who was in the UK first, the core principle is that when someone is seeking to exercise their rights under international law, they should be treated with dignity. They may then be unsuccessful in their application - so be it - when somebody is in the process of exercising their rights they should be treated with dignity. I do not think that is too high a bar for a State with the resources Ireland has to set itself. Should it be applied to all the people in Ireland who are homeless who sleep on the streets? Yes, it should. It is not acceptable for anybody. There is this idea of us being somehow unable to meet this standard and Europe is forcing us. We are able to meet it; it is a choice not to do so. Then the idea underneath it, a little subtle line, is that it will make it harder to do performative, competitive cruelty of a race to the bottom along the line of we do not want ourselves to look attractive. We want images of misery that migrants are experiencing around the world. We see that in the United States. We see it is not an accidental effect. Part of the agenda in the United States is to display situations of misery to create unhappiness and fear. That has a purpose. I am not saying that this is necessarily the Minister's intention but when and if we erode the kinds of standards of the European Convention on Human Rights, chip away at them, lower the bar and set the idea that countries should be able to pick and choose their own interpretations of the kinds of concepts we all agreed collectively as humanity, we are on a very slippery slope. Frankly, so many of the provisions of this legislation are backward steps. They may not be the steps that I have talked about. They may not be what is happening in the United States but it is an architecture that allows for a very worrying erosion of rights. I worry that when we see erosion of rights in practice, the kind of thing that is allowed for here, it will be in breach of the ECHR. That is why having that safety net of a measure of a report that will show that, when we are testing this, we are testing it against that fundamental set of standards, which I do not think is too onerous for Ireland to meet it, is an appropriate safety net for us to have. For those of us who are disappointed to see the legislation guillotined through and who are disappointed that the specific concerns we have raised will not be addressed, at least ensuring ECHR will be measurably tested against the enactment of the Bill is some kind of a safety net and may act as a watchdog or a guard against the dangerous tendencies we have seen both in democratic practice in terms of the Bill and in some of the powers that are allowed for under the legislation. --- 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