International Protection Bill 2026: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-03-25
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Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel

I appreciate why the Minister is saying he has to comply with the ECHR but I do not see why we could not accept the amendments, especially the amendment on reporting. I just think it is a non-argument and we have had that in the Chamber before, though not in relation to justice. I think in the mental health Bill we were told we could not include the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for some reason. The idea we cannot put the legislation and governing articles the Government says it abides by in its legislation is like double-speak. I do not know why we would not have it in the legislation. There is no clarity on that. It seems it should be a non-issue to accept the amendment if the Government is in fact abiding by the ECHR.
I have a whole messy set of notes here so Members will have to bear with me. To pick up on the Minister’s last point, no one is talking about open borders. No one has said that phrase. That is not anyone’s consideration. The Minister may forgive me, as it might not have been him, but certainly other senior members of the Government have made a comment about getting us in line with the UK to make Ireland an equally hostile environment for people seeking asylum. What we are saying is people have the right to seek asylum, which I assume the Minister agrees with conceptually as well. However, it has been said by members of the Government, though perhaps not by the Minister, that we should have an equally hostile environment to deter people. That has been said and has been implied by the Government.
I was a little mischaracterised in some of the responses. The Minister has said the commitment is absolute but I would argue you cannot have an absolute commitment to the ECHR while also seeking to lower the threshold of non-conditional rights, especially around Article 3. Again, that is double-speak. Up is down, left is right and black is white. You cannot have an absolute commitment while undermining the absolute protections of Article 3.
The Minister talked about democracy and rule of law. I commend those principles but a key element of democracy and rule of law is, of course, the civil society strand, that is, the space for civil society participation and inclusion. The Chișinău process has been utterly uninclusive. Human rights organisations, including the ICCL, which seemed to get some stray bullets in the contributions from other Senators, IHREC and human rights organisations across the Council of Europe have tried, tried and tried again to engage governments around the steering committee for human rights, CDDH, process. There was zero appetite for that engagement, so we cannot be claim to be champions of the rule of law while ignoring one of the fundamental pillars, which is civil society engagement. Within our aid and development work through the Department of foreign affairs, we have programmes on democracy and rule of law in countries in the global south and we expect them to have a metric of effective, meaningful and inclusive civil society engagement, but we are not doing that here. That raises some pretty serious questions about the commitment of the Government in that space.
There seemed to be a sense I was saying we should not have political engagement on the ECHR but I never said that and it was a mischaracterisation as well. Political engagement is incredibly important and that is why I talked about how states were fundamental to the court of human rights. I talked about how states were really important for implementing it and that states should be developing litigation strategies, challenging judgments they do not agree with and ensuring ongoing dialogue with Strasbourg to make sure there is harmony between what it and their domestic courts say. I said that very clearly.
I highlight again that it is disingenuous to say the court is preventing deportations of foreign criminals. There have been cases and the Minister cites them-----

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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