Schools.

Sentiment score: 0.00

There is a world in which this Bill could have been a turning point. This was potentially an opportunity to build an international protection system that would put dignity, fairness, care and, yes, efficiency at the heart of how we treat people who come to our country seeking protection. We had one such vision. We had the Catherine Day report, which stated we should move away from privatisation, build public, not-for-profit accommodation and build trust. We had a chance to honour that. Instead of seizing the opportunity to deliver a protection system grounded in compassion and rights, the Minister has produced legislation that goes further and harder than the EU pact ever required. He has done so at the expense of human dignity. The way in which this Bill has been brought forward adds insult to that injury. For the past year, every time I or anyone else raised the failures of our current protection system, the answer, whether from the Minister for justice or other Ministers, has always been the same. It is that the International Protection Bill is coming and we should wait it because it will fix everything. This Bill has been used as a deflection to say real reforms were on the way and we just had to hold tight so the Minister could get it right. At pre-legislative scrutiny, vital heads of Bill were missing and we were told the full Bill would arrive by the end of 2025. We did not get it until last Thursday, nine days after the Minister's press release indicating he had just published it. However, we got conversations with details of restrictions on refugee family reunification. Those were laid out in detail whereas the rest of the detail in the Bill was not. That was not a tactical omission. Now, in a rush to transpose it by June, we have a Bill that is still riddled with gaps and key protections are still missing or, at best, vague. It leaves the best interests of the child assessments undefined. It keeps legal counselling deliberately ambiguous. It creates an independent monitoring mechanism the Minister can control. There is no clarity on how medical vulnerability assessments will be carried out or by whom, even though they are mandatory under the pact. On family reunification, the Bill refers vaguely back to the pact. All the while, we have the Minister signalling his intention to restrict it further, despite not seeming to know how many people came through the family reunification process last year. That is to name but a few of the issues, and I will come back to each of them in more detail. These are not minor oversights. They are the core safeguards of the Bill, which are now being promised through later amendments. Amendments that will reshape major parts of the Bill are being withheld until Committee Stage when they will face minimal scrutiny, if any. The Minister presented those omissions almost as an invitation for us to collaborate but I do not believe that for a second. It just looks like homework that was left undone. This is one of the most consequential Bills in decades and we are being asked to pass it through our legislative process in pieces and without the transparency and accountability it demands. That is insulting. We are debating a Bill that will reshape how Ireland treats people at their most vulnerable and we are doing it in the shadow of a system so broken that the courts have had to intervene. In 2024, the High Court found that the Government had breached its basic human rights obligations by failing to provide even minimal accommodation to people seeking protection. That decision has since been overturned by the Court of Appeal but the matter is now before the Supreme Court. The question of whether the State breached the fundamental right to dignity is still unresolved at the highest level of our justice system. While that question hangs in the balance, the Minister has brought forward a Bill that doubles down on a system that is already broken and found wanting. The International Protection Bill is needed to transpose the EU migration asylum pact but let us not rewrite history. The Government made a choice to opt in. The Social Democrats voted against that decision, not because there was not an urgent need for reform in our international protection system but because we had serious concerns about the human rights safeguards, the impact on the common travel area and Ireland rushing into alignment with an EU system, all while our own system is so deeply broken. Almost two years later, none of those issues have been resolved. The question is whether this Bill builds a system that is lawful, rights compliant and capable of being trusted. On that test, it does not just fall short but fails completely. To go into the substance of that, in the area of legal counselling one of the most consistent and serious criticism raised during pre-legislative scrutiny concerned access to legal advice and representation. The general scheme repeatedly referred to "legal counselling". The Bill defines "legal assistance" and "legal representation", yet "legal counselling" is left almost entirely undefined. It is referenced once but explained nowhere. That is a choice. Legal counselling is not a concept recognised in Irish law. There is no clarity on who provides it, what standards apply, what qualifications are required or what recourse exists when it fails. Today, thanks to incredible journalism, Shamim Malekmian at the Dublin Inquirer found, through a freedom of information request, that officials were actively considering using chatbots and digital tools to deliver this undefined legal counselling. There is no better example of stripping away the humanity of the process than potentially using chatbots. We are talking about people fleeing persecution, trauma or war arriving to a country they believe will treat them with care and being met, not by a solicitor or interpreter, not even by a trained caseworker, but, potentially, by an AI chatbot. That should alarm us all. The notion that a vulnerable person at the outset of a protection process could be guided - or misguided - by an automated system with no legal training requirements, professional accountability or statutory safeguards feels dystopian rather than protective. In the Minister's response, I would like him to confirm if the potential for the use of artificial intelligence is being left open. Is that why legal counselling remains undefined? When it comes to detention, we have known since pre-legislative scrutiny on the Bill how significantly it expands the State's detention powers, including in the context of border and return procedures. This Bill confirms what stakeholders have warned for months. It remains vague on where and under what conditions people will be detained and what inspection and oversight their detention will be subject to. Concerns have been raised about people with serious medical needs, the lack of clarity around inspection regimes and the potential use of inappropriate locations. If the State is to deprive people of their liberty, it has a legal obligation to spell out in primary legislation the legal basis, conditions and safeguards. This Bill does not do that. It gives the State more power first and promises clarity later. That is not how deprivation of liberty should ever be legislated for. What is most disturbing is what this Bill does in relation to children. For the first time in Irish law, it allows a child to be detained because of their migration status. Yes, there has been a slight improvement on the general scheme but only because the time limit is now 12 hours. On the principle, that line has never been crossed before and the Ombudsman for Children has said the detention of a child due to their migration status can never be justified. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is clear that it is always a violation of rights and is never in a child's best interest. The EU migration pact sets minimum standards but it does not require us to detain children. It also does not stop us from going further to protect them. That was a choice. The Minister chose to cross a line this country has always refused to cross. He chose to remove the prohibition on child detention from our law and replace it with legal permission. At a time when the world is watching in horror the detention of school children at borders in the United States, our Government is choosing to make that possible here. The Bill establishes an independent monitoring mechanism and a chief inspector of asylum border procedures. In principle, that is welcome but independence is not achieved by branding. A reading of the Bill confirms serious concerns about the mechanism's independence, scope and effectiveness. The chief inspector is appointed by the Government and can be removed where, in the opinion of Government, that is in the best interest of the State. That standard does not apply to genuinely independent oversight bodies in this country because real oversight requires independence from the Executive, not dependence on it. Worse still, the chief inspector's remit is narrowly confined to designated border facilities. There is no explicit statutory obligation to investigate deaths or serious harm, there is no power to initiate civil proceedings, and the Minister retains the power to redact reports before they are laid before the House. That is not robust oversight. Only weeks ago, the Inspector of Prisons raised strikingly similar concerns about the erosion of real independence and transparency in our prison system, where inspections are limited, reports are delayed and access is controlled. That is a clear pattern. This Government wants the appearance of accountability without any of the inconvenience that comes with it. When it comes to children and minors, especially those arriving alone, the Bill remains deeply flawed. We are talking about one of the most vulnerable cohorts in the international protection system yet, as drafted, this Bill makes them even more vulnerable because the safeguards promised in the EU pact for the best interests of the child have not been transposed. There are unresolved concerns about age assessment, compressed timelines and a lack of clarity on who even makes these determinations. There is a real risk that children may be wrongly assessed as adults and routed into accelerated or border procedures. Once that happens, the consequences are immediate and severe. They include loss of child-specific protections, exposures to detention and a real risk of removal before errors can be corrected. At the very least, we should expect that these children are visible, protected and properly recognised in every part of our statutory framework. This Bill does not meet that standard, and no amount of rushed implementation excuses that failure. This Bill completely reshapes the appeals systems, embedding a presumption against oral hearings and vastly expanding accelerated border procedures. While I do acknowledge changes since the general scheme such that appeals officers may order an oral hearing where necessary, which is a modest improvement on the general scheme, this appears to remain discretionary. This discretion matters. The removal of a guaranteed oral hearing significantly weakens the fairness of the process. For many applicants, especially those with trauma or limited documentation, an oral hearing is their only real chance to explain their case in person, respond to doubts, clarity and misunderstandings, and actually be heard. Without that, the process risks becoming mechanical, impersonal and prone to error. At the same time, appeals are not automatically suspended for all applicants. People may be removed unless they successfully make a separate request to remain. In a system this complex, with weakened access to legal advice, again, that is never a safeguard. We are also discussing all of these vast sweeping changes in the context of a system bursting at the seams that has been left without adequate staffing and resources for years. How exactly will all these enormous new measures be funded? So many of these assessments are mandatory under EU law. They need to be resourced adequately to be in any way meaningful. The Bill significantly expands mandatory medical and vulnerability assessments, as required under the EU pact, but it gives very little clarity on how the State will actually deliver those assessments. During the Oireachtas joint committee's pre-legislative scrutiny of the general scheme, front-line healthcare representatives warned that the current system does not have the capacity to cope with the scale of clients and accelerated timelines envisoned by the new legislation. Safetynet's evidence, grounded in daily clinical practice, showed that within guaranteed access to healthcare professionals, including for vulnerability and medical checks, this Bill risks leaving both physical and mental health needs unaddressed. Drills such as medical legal assessments, which are essential for certain claims, are already beyond existing capacity unless resourced properly. The justice committee's report endorsed these concerns and recommended that screening centres be adequately resourced, with proper access to healthcare, and that health checks should go beyond a one-off examination and should allow for follow-up when necessary. In other words, people tasked with delivering these evaluations said they cannot do what the Bill expects without major investment and planning, yet this Bill offers neither clarity nor commitment on funding, staffing or integration with existing public services. The Government's text is entirely silent on how those crucial health assessments will be delivered in practice. In the area of family reunification, I will speak about how this Bill has been sold and how the Minister has used family reunification as a distraction. It makes up a tiny fraction of protection applications yet it is being treated like a central problem. There is no evidence of rising numbers. In fact, applications fell by 31% last year but still the Minister has chosen to focus the public debate here, manufacturing a crisis that does not exist at all. Worse still, he has deliberately conflated refugee family reunification, which is a basic right in international and Irish law, with other reunification migration schemes. The Bill does not set out the changes. It simply refers back to the pact and we are told the rest will come by amendment. However, the Minister has already signalled his intention of a three-year wait, financial requirements and more hurdles, delays and suffering for people who have already endured enough. Some 669 people availed of that scheme last year. They were, without question, wives, husbands and children and, in the case of unaccompanied minors, they were a brother, sister or parent. Siblings accounted for 45 people. That is where the Minister has chosen to focus his attention. There are so many aspects of this Bill that are cruel. We will bring forward amendments. The Minister is offering collaboration. We have yet to see if that will come to pass.

Sentiment score: -0.01