Naturalisation and Citizenship: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-09-24 ============================================================ Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel I thank the Minister of State for coming here for the debate. I recognise that in his opening statement he talked about the need to periodically review the legal framework around citizenship and it is important that we have space for this discussion. It is great to have space for this debate without the context of the legislation. However, my concern is that how it was announced has created a huge amount of concern among our migrant community, many of whom are on the pathway or believed they were on the pathway to citizenship, specifically security and stability in the knowledge they could stay here and build lives here permanently. My concern is that the way this legislation was announced and these massive changes were announced seems to be in the context of an urgent problem that we have to fix. However, I do not know what the problem is and maybe the Minister of State can outline what it is. What emergency are we responding to with this legislation? A lot of people feel that they are having the rug pulled out from underneath them. They have been living here and have been contributing. In some instances, they might have married Irish people but even if they have not married Irish people, their kids might be in school and they want to build lives here. They are contributing to our economy and to our communities. Some applicants may have been here for four years and six months. They had a pathway, a plan for their lives and suddenly that is about to change. In many ways, it actually directly impacts integration. The Minister of State spoke a lot about the importance of integration as all of the contributors have. Integration is important and I hope this will come into the pre-legislative scrutiny in the justice committee. There is a plethora of research showing that having no pathway to citizenship or permanent residency and no pathway to stability of where they live for the future can have a direct impact on their ability to integrate. There is a huge amount of research into that. What is really frustrating about the context of this debate is that I am not getting the evidence on which we are making this change. All of our policy-making should be based on evidence and I am not seeing the evidence upon which this change was made. The Minister of State mentioned about bringing us so that we are not an outlier in Europe. I do not accept that point because 11 other countries have a five-year requirement. My major concern is that we are not considering alternative pathways for migrants to apply for permanent residency. Citizenship is one thing, but creating stability so people can live here in the long term is another. Many countries do not permit dual citizenship. Some people may not want to give up the citizenship of their country of origin but they do want to build a life here. Therefore, having that alternative is really important. I have concerns from the scant information that we have so far on the plans. One of them relates to the requirements around work. Obviously, we want people to be in our society contributing actively; that is really positive. However, what if someone becomes sick or is made redundant? Are they excluded from applying for citizenship because they have taken statutory sick pay? Will someone who may have had cancer or some sort of chronic illness be excluded? They might be looking after a relative, possibly their partner, and in receipt of carer's benefit. Will they be excluded because they received that social welfare payment? In that case, we are sort of saying that the only pathway to citizenship is for people who have money and do not need to rely on support in the State even if they have been taxpaying citizens and actively contributing. If medical staff, nurses, doctors, people who come to look after our sick and our elderly, and people in the care space get statutory sick pay will they be excluded? That is a really important question that a lot of people want answered because there is not clarity on that. Will someone with a disability be denied because they receive disability payment or disability allowance? We have already heard from one of the other Senators about the break in the Irish residence permit, IRP, renewal. There have been chronic delays in IRP renewals, as I am sure the Minister of State knows. I know there is a grace period. Will the grace period be included when it comes to totting up the months that someone has been in the country, for example? Many people have been way over. Let us say there are three months that they can apply for. They can apply on 1 March and they have three months to receive. Particularly during the Covid pandemic, there were massive delays. Again, anxiety is being created for people around that. I am not inherently opposed to the language requirement. I agree with the other contributors on the need to be able to actively engage in society. To do so, people absolutely need to speak the language of that country, but we also need to ensure that there is State support for that because there is a cost to their getting language lessons. Again, we are saying that pathway to citizenship only exists if people have the money to pay for those lessons. There is a component around that too. The Minister of State is shaking his head. Maybe he will be able to outline if that will be part of the support programmes he plans within that. We need to think about the long-term planning of this country. The government's own Project 2040 plan outlined the need for inward migration to meet the demographic changes that we are going to be seeing to fuel our economy. Administrative and support services rely on having 45% non-Irish labour. For accommodation and food services, it is 45%. In the information and communication sectors, it is 41%. We need highly skilled people. There is a competitive market for highly skilled labour in Europe at the moment. In order to get people into the country, we need to be attractive and incentivise. There are lots of different ways we can offer those incentives. A really clear way is providing a pathway to permanent residency. However, we are making that more difficult and more challenging through these changes. It will create insecurity and they will choose to take their high skills elsewhere. I receive emails from people working in the tech sector who are saying this. I worry that we are creating a double-edged sword with this and I hope that will be discussed in the pre-legislative scrutiny. We are actually disincentivising people whom we need in our economy and in our labour market and that is a concern. I will pick up on the question of alternative pathways and alternative citizenship. As I mentioned, not everyone wants to give up their citizenship if their country does not allow dual citizenship. We are quite unusual that we do not have a permanent residency status. In addition, becoming a citizen obviously has a cost to it and some people cannot afford that because of other obligations, etc., in their lives. Permanent residency gives a migrant a sense of certainty and stability that actually supports adopting and integrating into a new culture. That stability and knowing they have a long-term future somewhere is a really core component of that. We do know that reducing access to citizenship status or having no permanent residency will have a direct impact on integration. For example, if I moved to the US for a job and I had to apply every single year for my residency application to be approved and I had a child and my child starts school but I still have to keep making that application, it would not give me a sense of hope for a future there. It would not give me a sense of stability. That is what we are looking at here. If social cohesion and integration are our end goal, then changing the goalposts and narrowing the criteria could have a negative knock-on consequence for that. I am not opposed to this debate. I am not opposed to having new discussions about how people can live fruitful, stable, integrated and communal lives in Ireland. However, we have a glaring gap with not having a permanent residency status. It is a glaring gap in Ireland. If I am honest, my concern is that this debate is reactionary, that we are posturing and it is not based on policy and evidence. I feel we have relentless negativity from the Government when it comes to the question of migration and a feeding of a negative statement towards migrants is having a direct impact on people. We know there is a rise in racism and in hate crime. We have seen that over the past 12 months and it is absolutely awful. It is not what any of us in the two Houses wants. We need to be careful of how we conduct this debate and to be mindful of the people and the very real lives that are affected whenever discussions about who is and is not valuable to us as a State are put into the public realm. It has real knock-on consequences. I hope this debate will continue to be constructive, evidence-based and grounded in the lives of real people and what our country needs in the long term. --- 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/2026-09-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:50+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-24