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 will be brief because it is probably stretching things. It has been 22 years since I was chair of the Council of justice and home affairs ministers. I will say two things to the Minister. First, he should never underestimate the extent to which the other members of the council will agree with my point of view rather than the point of view of some people in the Berlaymont building. They are much more independent spirits. Second, the Eurodac procedure is very useful for identifying somebody who applies for asylum in one country and attempts to do the same in another country within the European Union. That is useful. However, somebody might fly from somewhere in north-eastern Africa to Luxembourg, a safe country where he could apply for asylum if he had a good case and decide to move on to Dublin where he will get off the plane and go to Belfast with all the consequences we heard about in Belfast. Eurodac does not have any function in those circumstances. Nobody in Luxembourg would ask whether he had any right to travel to Dublin, whether he had any legitimate cause to go to Dublin or whether he even had a visa that allowed him into Dublin. That person is effectively choosing Ireland from somewhere he booked his flights to start with, or where they were booked for him by people smugglers. That is effectively destination shopping among asylum seekers, which is totally at variance with the notion and proper interpretation of the international conventions. I may be being persecuted in Ireland, but that does not mean that I can ask myself where I would really like to live. It might be Australia or New Zealand or perhaps America. We accord to would-be asylum seekers the right to travel from the point at which they claim they were being persecuted to Luxembourg, then to Dublin without applying for asylum here, and then to Northern Ireland to apply within the United Kingdom for asylum. That is an absurd notion. This absurdity and all that follows in terms of the difficulty of controlling it flows from the inappropriate policies and procedures defended at European level and, unfortunately, upheld by the Court of Justice of the European Union to the point where, as things stand, unless the Minister's council takes a stance on the issue and does something about it, we have effectively little or no defence against bogus asylum seeking.

---

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