Criminal Law, Civil Law and Defence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Report and Final Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-02 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland I am very grateful to the Minister for explaining that. I feel a sense of disappointment on hearing that the information is there but it cannot be used for immigration purposes or for the purposes of the verification of asylum claims. It is purely restricted to the particular cases mentioned. It strikes me that if the EU is serious – sometimes I wonder if it is – about asylum seeking as a mask for breaching immigration law right across the European Union, that in putting in the kind of safeguards the Minister has spoken about, such that everything has to be destroyed after six months, Ireland does not have access to what Luxair or whatever airline it was in the case of Luxembourg that the Minister outlined, saw and took a photocopy of and were required for some purposes to keep. We cannot say this individual claims he is from Somalia and that he came from England but we believe that the evidence is there to show that he came a totally different way and that he is not telling us the truth. All of that is ignored and made unusable out of what I think is a false theory of keeping Big Brother under control. We can go back to the hugely controversial issue that surrounded the Graham Dwyer trial. When I was Minister in the Department of justice, some gratuitous activist in the EU decided that it would be a great thing if all member states of the EU were obliged to keep phone records. That was fine. I would not mind that too much but then it was decided that as a countervailing provision for that, they were all obliged to get rid of them after two years. In those days, the Irish phone companies, because of the Statute of Limitations and because people could contest bills and dispute whether they were being charged correctly or incorrectly for use of telephone communications, kept their data for six years. Some bright spark in Europe decided if we are going to have a rule that everybody must do this – even though nearly everybody was doing it – we are going to say that as the countervailing protection for the privacy of individuals that after two years they must all be got rid of. What is the sense of that? If somebody can keep my phone data for two years, I do not see how my rights as a citizen to my good name, privacy or anything else are in any way advanced by requiring their destruction after two years and requiring that the law be changed to that effect. The funny thing is that we made the point at that time, through the then Attorney General – the late Rory Brady SC. He challenged this regulation as an unnecessary interference in our perfectly reasonable arrangements in Ireland and he was slapped down by the European Court of Justice. Later on, however, the same directive was invalidated by the same court because it was not sufficiently protective of people's privacy. If you are coming into Ireland as an immigrant or if you are getting on an aeroplane, or a ferry for that matter, to come to Ireland, it is no great interference with your privacy rights that a record is kept of that event and is accessible to investigation at a later stage. The Minister has recently been made aware of a contract killer coming into Ireland, apparently with a view to killing somebody in Ireland. By a happy outcome, the same contract killer died in a motor crash before he could carry out his work. One would believe that he came from an EU country but we do not know that. I do not see how my privacy rights, my right to dignity as a human being or the power of Big Brother are in any way involved if they can prove that four years ago, I travelled to Warsaw because a record was made of it for immigration law purposes and nor do I believe that any asylum seeker has any legitimate reason not to have their means of access into this State easily verifiable by data that can exist for one purpose but cannot be used for another purpose. I want to put on record my sense that the European Union is not serious – I am sorry to say this on the second day of our Presidency of the European Union – but it is not competent with a small "c", not a legal large "C" to deal with immigration and asylum seeking. It has made a mess of it and should return those competences to member states to take individually whatever measures they consider are necessary to protect the rights of real asylum seekers and to distinguish between bogus asylum seekers and economic migrants who are seeking to circumvent the law. The sooner that those changes are brought about the better. --- 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/2026-07-02/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:09+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-02