Air Navigation and Transport (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel The Minister of State who was here before Deputy Buttimer said that it was too expensive to do this and to enforce our own rules. I believe he also used the term "onerous", which is extraordinary language to use when we are talking about enforcing our own rules. All we are asking for is an inspection regime. There seems to be some sort of vast misunderstanding on the other side of the House as to what the Bill actually does. People kept talking about military flights. This Bill actually does not deal with military flights in any way. This is about the inspection of civilian aircraft that are carrying weapons. It seems to be suggested that weapons are not actually being carried through Ireland. That is absolutely factually incorrect. I noted a comment that the Department's investigation has been ongoing since 2024. That is fantastic. It has been going on for two years. When will this investigation land on our tables? When will we know that the Department actually knows what is going on? Someone else said that we cannot direct planes but, of course, I never said we should. Senator Higgins was very clear on the purpose of this Bill. If a plane does not land, the company can be fined. We know about these planes from the manifests. It is not secret. I have listed them all out before. There was an assertion that this could not be effectively implemented. As I have said, this is a very implementable Bill, unless we do not believe in the Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers and think it is not up to scratch. I do not believe any of us in this Chamber would agree with that. On the grounds for opposing the Bill, I personally do not see an issue with the transfer of ministerial responsibilities. It happens all of the time. Frankly, I do not care which Minister provides the exemptions. My primary focus and the sole focus and purpose of this legislation is to implement tighter controls in respect of the inspection of aircraft. I am not remotely tied to any vehicle or mechanism or to a particular person exempting state aircraft. What I care about is making it more difficult for ICE deportation flights to stop over in Ireland and stopping the illegal transportation of weapons. I therefore feel a bit frustrated. It is a bit pathetic of the Government to oppose the Bill on this ground because it knows that this could have been worked through as part of the legislative process, including on Committee Stage. However, the Government is unwilling to do so. The Government is not serious when it comes to this issue. It is not seriously willing to engage. I have been told that I am well intentioned. I am, but I also see a serious legislative gap in this area. It is a serious issue. Our own rules are being breached. As I said before, I did not create the rules. They were created by the people who sat in these Houses before us. Instead of offering any solutions to this problem, the ongoing egregious breach of our own sovereign rules, the Government is just saying that this Bill will not work. It is not willing to commit. I have demonstrated an openness to cross-party collaboration but the Government will not work with me on this. It did not do it with the previous Bill, the arms embargo Bill, either. There were questions around enforcement issues and sovereign immunity. The Bill was drafted with sovereign immunity in mind. It seeks to push the policy objective as far as possible within what is permissible. This is why it is framed as an express stipulation as part of an invitation to fly or land. We have pushed sovereign immunity to its limits. We are requesting that state aircraft respect human rights. It is entirely directional. Should we not want to give that direction? Should we not want to tell aeroplanes that land that we would like them to respect human rights? Should that not be a basic requirement? There was also an assertion that constitutional protections would not be applied to non-citizens. The legal advice I have received from the OPLA tells me that, if a person was subject to rendition in Ireland, a court would find that he or she had constitutional protections. I do not agree with the three points the Minister of State put forward as to why this Bill is not being allowed to move to the next Stage and amended to strengthen it. The Bill is legally sound and implementable. There seems to be an absolute misunderstanding. I believe that may be on purpose and that there may be a wilful desire not to really and meaningfully engage with the detail of the Bill and the idea of the inspection regime, something that came out of a previous government. I did not pick this out of nowhere. It is bound in previous debates in the Dáil and in the Seanad. We know that weapons are being flown through Ireland. We know that weapons have been flown through Ireland on the way to Israel. We know that there are weapons being flown through Ireland for which exemptions have not been sought. That is breaking our own rules. I can only assume that the Government is happy with the status quo , does not find this egregious breach to be a problem and believes the fact that it undermines our neutrality to be perfectly okay. None of the statements today challenge that. None of the statements actually engage with the policy intent of the Bill. It was all about potential challenges to implementation, points I utterly disagree with. There was no meaningful engagement with the issue. Do we agree that we are breaching our neutrality by allowing these planes to fly through Ireland against our own rules? Do we agree that we are breaching our own sovereign independence by permitting this to happen without any exemptions in place? That is what is happening. I am frustrated that there cannot be any opportunity for collaboration on this issue. This is something people really care about. It is not just me off doing my well-intentioned stuff. This is something that has meaning to the people of Ireland. I really cannot fathom why we would see Palestinians shackled in Shannon Airport and not try to put mechanisms in place to prevent that. I am deeply disappointed that the Government will not allow the Bill to progress to Committee Stage, where we could work together to amend it. I am serious about working across the floor on good legislation that addresses serious legislative gaps. --- 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/2026-06-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:02+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-10