International Protection Bill 2026: From the Seanad
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-15
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Jim O'Callaghan (FF), Dublin Bay South

I thought we agreed on it. Is he now saying that is not correct, that it is not the case that the majority of people come through the common travel area? We strongly believe it is. We do not have the data he is talking about collating. I will talk to senior officials in the Department about it but I suspect it will be a huge amount of effort to collate information which ultimately will not have a huge impact on public policy because it will not undermine the fact that the significant majority of people - probably more than 85% to 90% - come through the UK.
This leads me on to Deputy Gannon's question. If he looks at the nationalities of the people coming to Ireland - each week I publish details of the numbers of people coming in - they are coming predominantly from four or five countries which are consistently near the top. I will not name them here again. In assessing those applications, work is done to determine whether they are from people who previously had visas granted to them by the UK. Many of them do not appear to be people who were granted visas because we know the nationalities. There is one exception. There is one country, where the UK hands out a lot of visas to people from those countries for study and that may have an impact. They may be coming here as a result, but for the other main countries it is not usual for the UK to give out large numbers of visas in respect of them.
On what Deputy Gannon said about returns, the point he emphasised emphasises to me the need for Ireland to be part of a returns regulation that at present is the subject of a proposal by the Commission. It is important that we have a mechanism to deal with individuals who have claimed asylum and have been adjudicated not to be entitled to it. That is a problem no matter what we do. For it to work efficiently - and it does not at present - there must be a returns process as provided for under the Dublin III regulation. Every European country says that Dublin III does not work. That is why work is ongoing in the Commission to put in place an effective returns regulation.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-15