International Protection
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-12
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Colm Brophy (FG), Dublin South-West

I thank the Senator. I will refer again to the closing remarks I made in my initial reply to her. Since 2024, IPAS has not published the details of specific locations, the resident profile and the occupancy of individual accommodation centres. It is for a very good reason. It is to preserve the privacy, safety and well-being of residents and staff. That is accepted good practice. I am sure the Senator can see there is a need to protect and preserve that privacy and well-being for residents and staff. That is very important.
The work that the Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, and I have done has always been focused on wanting to provide what we believe is the best possible service. That means the best service in terms of providing international protection to applicants and ensuring we are working with communities through our engagement groups in making sure we have dialogue and an ongoing process of dealing with communities. In particular, we have been very successful in seeing an overall reduction in the number of international applicants coming into our country and seeing that number fall by over 30%. Therefore, by not having to open new IPAS centres and by consolidating the IPAS centres we currently have, we have saved the State millions of quid in terms of actually doing that work. We have ensured that we are now providing a very good, very focused international protection service, which delivers for the people of Ireland in terms of value for money, delivers for communities and delivers in providing services to people seeking international protection.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-12/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:55+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-12