Michael McDowell
National University of Ireland · Independent · Ireland
“Then I think of this particular Chamber where people are polite and kind to each other and listen to each other respectfully. There is no baying or shouting down or whatever. It is a great tribute to the Seanad staff that that spirit continues to exist in this House.”
“I note that the whole scheme of the planning Act is that exempt development proposals are considered by the Houses. It is questionable whether this House has really considered the exempt development regulations. Without debate, we sent them off to a committee.”
“I am one of the people who disagrees with the substance of that report. We have to have a real solid debate on it here in this House, not merely a cursory one. It is an issue of fundamental importance. It cannot be avoided, one way or the other. Whatever your views are on it, it needs to be thrashed out.”
“Although coming up to the end of this term we are rushing things through, and the guillotine is well-oiled and slicing this way and that, we have a lot of work to do in the autumn.”
“The people who did that were brought before the International Court of Justice and condemned and imprisoned. If Ireland does not clearly state that there are to be consequences for people who do things like what Mladić, Milošević and Karadžić were brought to account for, if we are incapable as a State of publicly saying that what Secretar…”
“If we cannot, as a State, say publicly to Rubio, "Hands off the International Criminal Court", when they were quite happy when the people who did the 7,000 murders in Srebrenica got their just desserts, but when there is any suggestion that what has happened in Gaza, with 70,000 innocent people killed by aerial bombardment and land bombar…”
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“Kelly has said that unfortunately the situation is continuing to degenerate. Let us be clear about that. Overcrowding has a long history. It goes back to the circumstances investigated in the Gary Douche commission of inquiry, where a man was killed in a basement room in Mountjoy with, I think, 14 other people in it by a prisoner suffering from a psychotic condition who had been sent there from, I think, Cloverhill, on an exchange programme because he was too unruly in Cloverhill. That report was deeply critical of the decision-making process and of the then Governor of Mountjoy for allowing that situation to arise. Thornton Hall must be built. There is no way around it. I will explain why.”
“I welcome the Minister and thank him for his contribution. I agree with nearly everything he said and with Senator Fitzpatrick's contribution. Sending someone to prison should be a last resort. That is a view I have always held at all points - when I was a barrister prosecuting, when I was a Minister and when I was Attorney General. I still hold that view. Mark Kelly, Inspector of Prisons, has reported to the justice committee of these Houses. In February he stated that the circumstances in Cloverhill Prison were degrading conditions due to overcrowding and in Mountjoy they were so bad that they amounted, in his view, to inhuman and degrading treatment banned by the European Convention on Human Rights. I am not saying this to be critical of the Minister because he is fresh to the job but Mr.”
“I urge the Minister of State to accelerate the process and to come back here within a year. Otherwise, a bright and enterprising Senator such as Senator Byrne will produce a Private Members' Bill to remedy the problems that exist. It would be embarrassing for the Government to have to decline to accept such a Bill.”
“I make that point in order to differ slightly from Senator Conway. We do not have three, four or five years to do this. It should be done in the next 12 months, because the problems are there. There is no massive conflict of interest here. It is not as if solicitors want to impede their clients from entering into enduring power of attorney arrangements, but there is a very definite set of obstacles that they are encountering and that affect not them so much as their clients. This will lead to disputes, injustices and exploitation of people who are suffering from mental disabilities. Such people can be exploited. The presence of enduring power of attorney is a service as well for people who anticipate that their intellectual capacity is going to go into decline.”
“I agree with Senators Conway and Byrne in relation to this matter. I thank the Minister of State and her officials for bringing this legislation before the House. To echo what Senator Tully said, the emergency aspect of this could have been foreseen. The problems which are there with enduring powers of attorney are real. The result of those problems is that enduring power of attorney arrangements are not being entered into. Solicitors are simply saying, "No, Thanks. I am not doing that work.", or "Sorry, it is €3,000 or €5,000 to do that." The point I want to make is that if you sat down with an expert and they devised as many obstacles to the making of an ordinary will as have been put in place for the making of an enduring power of attorney, we would have no wills in this country either. We would have intestacies all over the place.”
“I am very glad to hear that. This is a bit of a legal stampede that we are creating. If the Courts Service says it can manage it, so be it. However, there will be a lot of additional expenditure for the wards, committees and practitioners involved. Being part of that stampede is not a welcome development. From what I hear from the Minister of State, she is not prepared to accept the amendment. If that is the case, I will press it but will not put it to a vote.”
“What the Law Society is saying is that a simple 12-month extension carries far less risk and entails far fewer legal costs, and that is the reason for its proposed amendment. The Minister of State has said that the 2015 Act required a five-year review process and that she intends to accelerate that, and I am glad to hear that. I am also glad to hear what she said about consultation. However, Standing Orders 179 and 204 of the two Houses of the Oireachtas apply to all legislation, including this Bill. In principle, we will get a report on how this Bill has gone in a year's time, if it is pushed through. I am putting down that marker.”
“It says that in order to ground the extension in each of the 1,400 cases, affidavits as to the reasons for the extension would need to be filed prior to 26 April 2026 and it is very likely that it will not be logistically possible to case manage all of those cases prior to 26 April 2026. It is easily foreseeable that this will result in legal challenges. I am sure the President of the High Court, Mr. Justice Barniville, will do his level best to ensure that there are not too many obstacles to the applications for extensions to be made. However, let us be clear about this. Unless there is some kind of agreement that practically no evidence or reasons are given, the process requires a paper trail and that paper trail involves affidavits setting out the circumstances.”
“The Law Society believes that it is a far more straightforward approach than that which is being proposed by the Minister in section 1 of the Bill. The Law Society understands that if the Bill is passed in its current form, in the region of 1,400 cases would be listed in court over the Easter period prior to 26 April 2026, and that includes the Easter vacation. We are taking our own vacation in these Houses, but so are the courts. The listing of some 1,400 cases for extension will, the Law Society said, result in an unnecessary burden on court resources, give rise to a very significant increase in legal costs and place further unnecessary stress and burden on wards and their committees. It said it will significantly impact on the ability of the wardship courts to hear the remaining cases for discharge.”
“I move amendment No. 1: In page 3, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “(a) in subsection (2) by substituting “4 years” for “3 years”,”. The amendment proposes to amend section 54(2) of the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act 2015 by substituting "four years" for "three years". I want to emphasise that the amendment is proposed by the Law Society. I have had the assistance of Áine Hynes, chair of the Law Society task force on mental health and capacity, and Dr. Brian Hunt, one of the policy directors in the Law Society. To explain why the proposal has been made by the Law Society to me and by me to this House, the purpose of the amendment is to extend the deadline for the exiting of wardships by one more year.”
“We have said they have to tell everybody, so you have to have a row in the family to get the whole process going. That simply cannot be right. I know it was enacted with the best of intentions that nobody would be left out and that it would not be done secretly or whatever, but there is such a thing as the privacy of the person facing a disability. I recognise the necessity of the Minister of State's Bill, but she should not think that it solves the problems. There are wider problems. I very much welcome the remarks made in her speech that she will engage with all of the stakeholders because there is a job of work to be done to make sure that the 2015 Act does not in fact have the counterproductive effect of scaring people away from remedies that should be widespread.”
“Second, I was conscious of this and I contacted the Law Society and asked it for its views. It suggested a number of amendments, most of which have been ruled out of order here. I accept that the Bill has a very narrow focus and is an emergency Bill, but the time has come for the Minister of State's Department to engage with the Law Society and ask what is wrong with the present process that people are afraid to avail of the remedies that are there. To give the Minister of State an example, the obligation on somebody contemplating enduring power of attorney to notify all of their children is offensive to many people. It is a private matter for them and not the business of all of their children. They may have difficult children and supportive children.”
“The time has come for the Minister of State's Department to simplify the procedures and make them easier and less demanding, especially for solicitors, who have all the best intentions for their clients. They do not want to turn away clients who are family members and the like but they equally now shudder when an enduring power of attorney request is made of them. The Minister of State should know that. This is not profitable work; it is difficult, hard work for solicitors and can go so badly wrong that many of them would prefer not to do it at all. That is reflected in the fact that a small number of solicitors rather than a large number right across the country are doing this kind of work. In terms of availability of assistance, that is a problem.”
“The reason I do so is that when an Act as groundbreaking as the 2015 Act comes into effect, it is hugely important that it is not just put up on the shelf there as an achievement in the Department but that it is immediately monitored as to how it is actually working. Any solicitor acting with a general practice, particularly a smaller solicitor's practice, is becoming increasingly frightened of the enduring power of attorney procedure. It is too difficult and troublesome to comply with. If you think of the hours you have to put into setting up an enduring power of attorney, you have to charge fees, and then people suddenly say that they had thought it was a simple thing, like making a will. It is not. The process is immensely difficult.”
“First, as we discussed here yesterday and as the Minister, Deputy Jim O'Callaghan found out at first hand the day before, there is an obligation on Ministers who sponsor any legislation to come back a year later and to inform this House by depositing a report under Standing Order 204 of the Dáil and Standing Order 179 of the Seanad, as to how the implementation has actually gone. Most Ministers and Departments do not know that but the Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan has said he is going to comply with that obligation in future. I urge the same on the Minister of State's Department.”
“I welcome the Minister of State to the House and congratulate her on her appointment. Following on from the last contribution, undoubtedly the 2015 Act was well intentioned, modernising and getting rid of the stigma of lunacy and the like that existed under Victorian wards of court legislation. I understand all of that. I also understand that it introduced a tiered approach to incapacity and that it purported to be rights-based. Having said all that, I do have to tell the Minister of State a couple of things.”
“The quota in Dublin Central, as I said, is 6,561. That reflects the fact that in urban Ireland there is a transient population. People are moving from flat to flat and all the rest of it and the register is in poor condition to start with, but it also reflects the fact that the difference between the citizen population entitled to vote and the non-national immigrant and transient population is so high in some areas. There is food for thought for everybody. I really do welcome the Minister's positive approach towards addressing the issues that have arisen tonight. Obviously, our debate has been very short but there is a lot of consideration to be undertaken by An Coimisiún Toghcháin and the Government because this is not going to go away.”
“We are going towards that because we have limited the number of Ministers we can have but there is no limit on the amount of TDs. I welcome the Government's non-opposition to the motion, which was not offered as a gimmick. We did not say we would save X or Y million or that we should have fewer politicians because that is a good idea. What we are really concerned about is the health of Irish democracy, which will be affected if we do not mend our ways, so to speak. I ask the Department in particular to reflect on the point Senator Keogan made - I did not expect her to make it but I think it is a startling point - that if you look at the difference between rural Ireland and urban Ireland, it requires a hell of a lot more votes to get a seat in the Dáil in parts of rural Ireland than it does in urban Ireland.”
“If we looked at what is happening now and we applied Éamon de Valera's 21,000 per TD, the Dáil would already have 278 Members. If we take account of what Sinn Féin has said, the Dáil would have 240 TDs at the 30,000 limit. If we went down to the 20,000 limit, it would be at 300 TDs or something like that. This is not an artificial issue. I and my colleagues did not say we want to save money. We are not talking about saving money. We are talking about having a viable Dáil. One of the problems with British democracy is that there is a small cabinet which does not work any more as a cabinet, and 500 people in Westminster who are effectively backbenchers. One of the problems with English democracy has been that complete imbalance between the Executive and the Membership of Parliament.”
“That is the achievement of giving it to NUI and the mess of rushing through the legislation because the Supreme Court cracked the whip. Let us remember that it has been a disastrous failure and somebody should do something about it. An Coimisiún Toghcháin should have taken responsibility for that and not asked NUI to preside over a collapse in the number of eligible graduates. I do not know how many graduates are entitled to vote for the six university seats but in theory I imagine it is about 800,000 because the number of people who have degrees now has increased massively compared with what it was when the State was founded. I completely agree with the Minister of State that we need to do something about local government.”
“That meant the population per TD was 21,000, so we were scraping along the bottom of the range then. We are now hammering out the ceiling all the time. Things have changed dramatically and it is not as if it is a wonderful formula. There has been a constant rise towards this imperative now that we have to keep increasing the numbers in the Dáil. Another point I wish to make, seeing as I have Senator Mullen here with me, is about the Minister of State's Department and how it gave a hospital pass to NUI for the reformed universities six-seat constituency. The result of all of that has been the following. Far from increasing the number of graduates who are going to vote in the next election, if there was an election held tomorrow the electoral register would have declined from 160,000 to roughly 70,000.”
“I thank the Minister of State and his officials for coming here this evening. It was an interesting debate. For instance, Senator Sharon Keogan mentioned the disparity in turnout and the numbers of votes needed to elect a TD. I was researching this and discovered the quota in Dublin Central was 6,561 and on the last census night 35% of the people of Dublin city - and this would be far more accentuated in city centre areas - were not born in Ireland. Maybe some of them were citizens but this reflects the difference between citizens and population, when 35% of the population on the last census night in Dublin were non-nationals at birth. The second thing I want to say is that the formula of 20,000 to 30,000 was a very flexible formula, but let us remember that in 1938 there were 138 TDs and the population of Ireland was 2.96 million.”
“Rather, it is something that has to be addressed as a matter of political inevitability. We are not suggesting that we should have a single-issue referendum next month or in two or six months' time because I do not know how many people would turn out in such a referendum. If there is a referendum opportunity, or if it can be put on the agenda to coincide with the next general election, people should be able to decide to end the 30,000 per TD linkage in terms of population and fix the size of the Dáil in a manner that corresponds to countries like Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Norway and Denmark, similar sized countries in similar parts of the world whose legislatures work well. I will hand over to Senator Craughwell.”
“No harm would be done if, as is the case in Seanad Éireann with its cap of 60 Members, Dáil Éireann chose a figure of 180, 190 or 200 TDs, or whatever. It should be something that is sustainable, as a Parliament, bearing in mind the size of the Executive, the needs of the Irish people and the point Deputy Cathal Crowe made today, that perhaps we need more local representatives with more powers. That is a different question, however. We are not being prescriptive. We are calling on the Government to initiate legislation in Dáil Éireann to decide this issue. This is not an entirely novel proposition. No less a person than the Tánaiste, Deputy Simon Harris, is on record as saying, in 2023, that this would have to be done. It is not, therefore, something that has been taken out of the hat like a rabbit to make a cheap political point.”
“That has the consequence of forcing the Government of the day to keep increasing the number of Deputies. As I said, we are not suggesting any particular number. We believe that Dáil Éireann, which is the initiator of constitutional change, should make up its own mind as to what it thinks the Irish people's ideal size of Dáil Éireann is. It should not be the case that the number of non-citizen persons in Ireland determines the number of TDs in Ireland. To give an example, if 120,000 Ukrainian people came to Ireland as a result of the Russian invasion, that would mean an extra four TDs. What sense is there in that? They may not be here for long. They may never take citizenship or they may go home. While they are given the right to vote in local elections, they have no right to vote in referendums unless they become citizens.”
“-----the 30 or 40 extra Deputies if we keep going the way we are. The real question is whether the draftsmen of the 1937 Constitution drew a distinction between a country that had a population that was significantly different from its number of citizens and one whose citizens composed its population. We now live in a different world, with EU rights of migration, asylum seeking and many people coming to Ireland on a transient basis to work for three, four or five years in industries such as the health service and the like but who then go elsewhere. The number of citizens no longer equates to the number of persons present on census nights. The consequence of all of that is that the formula in the 1937 Constitution means that as long as the population is going up, the number of Deputies goes up by 30,000 persons per Deputy minimum amount.”
“If the population grows much larger than that, we must remember that the Cabinet is restricted by the Constitution to 15 members and the number of people who would be non-ministerial officeholders in a Parliament of, say, 200 Members would be very substantial indeed. I had the pleasure of discussing this matter with Deputy Cathal Crowe, a Fianna Fáil Deputy from Clare, today. He made some valid points about our system of local government, which I call a prefecture. He said we got rid of town councils and a whole load of elected people and our motion suggested there should be a limit on the number of Deputies. One would have to rebuild Dáil Eireann's Chamber if we were approaching 200 Members. A major extension might possibly be required. It would be many multiples of bicycle sheds, let me put it that way, to accommodate-----”
“Finland has a ratio of MPs per million of the population of 35, Sweden 33, Ireland 32, Norway 30.33 and Denmark 29.95. We are not out of the ordinary in that respect, except that Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark are unicameral parliaments and we have a Seanad with a fixed number of Members of 60. The motion we have put forward recognises the fact that it is up to Dáil Éireann and not Seanad Éireann to initiate any constitutional change. The motion before us does not for one minute attempt to bind the House to the proposition that any particular number that the Independent Senators think is the ideal number should be the number chosen by the people if the question is put to them. Some might argue that the current figure of 174 is enough. Others might argue that anywhere up to 200 is enough.”
“In the 1930s, when the Constitution was enacted, our population was not only stable but actually in decline over the years of independence from 1922 to 1962. Our population is now growing very fast, the fastest among European Union member states. In that scenario, it seems to me that we have to consider how the formula in the Constitution looks in terms of where the Dáil is going in respect of size. People say there are international comparisons. If every 30,000 people in the United Kingdom required an MP, there would be roughly 2,300 members of the House of Commons. That is an unthinkable thing. Being practical and dealing with examples closer to home, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Norway and Denmark are all northern European parliamentary democracies of medium to small size.”
“We decided to propose the motion at this time and in this form because if the population grows to 5.56 million in the next two years, that implies we would have a Dáil comprising 185 Members, an increase from 174 at the current time. Nobody can project where it is going to go after that. There are all sorts of factors, such as demography, migration, asylum seeking, refugees and issues like that, which will determine precisely where our population stands in the next five, ten or 15 years. The crucial point is that our population, not our number of citizens, dictates the number of Deputies. That is a crucial point to remember. The number of people in Ireland on census night decides, based on the constitutional formula currently in place, how many Deputies there must be.”
“I move: “That Seanad Éireann: - conscious of the provisions of Article 46.2 of the Constitution which require that any Bill to amend the Constitution must be initiated in Dáil Éireann; - conscious of the present constitutional requirement that Dáil Éireann should be comprised of at least one member for every 30,000 in the State’s population, as distinct from citizens; - aware that the current population of the State is 5.458 million persons; - conscious that the population of the State is projected to grow to more than 5.56 million in the next two years; and - conscious of the likelihood that Dáil Éireann may have to be enlarged to between 181 members and 185 members in 2027; calls on the Government to initiate legislation to amend Article 16.2.2 to specify the number of members of Dáil Éireann.” I propose to share time with Senator Craughwell, 12 minutes and four minutes, if that is agreeable.”
“Sovereign member states have the right, especially under the European convention, to seek to make sure that its terms as interpreted by the court are compatible with their sovereignty and duty to their own citizens. We should not feel in any sense ashamed or claim it is a dilution of human rights if the vast majority of western liberal democracies that have considered the issue think the court has gone too far. There should be a process whereby they can express that opinion, and their expression of that opinion has some force and changes things rather than simply leading to member states of the convention ignoring its terms and the jurisprudence of the court.”
“If the jurisprudence of that court becomes inoperable or creates a serious problem for the member states, then if 38 member states say they have a problem with this, they are entitled to say so. Even France, Germany and Spain noted the official position of the Council of Europe that the issues raised in the letter, to which the Minister was a co-signatory, should be considered. In the end, it is no dilution of anything to maintain the workability of the ECHR. It is no departure from human rights standards to say that particular judgments and outcomes such as that required by the European Court of Justice in respect of the man from India, do not amount to common sense.”
“It went as far as it possibly could to say that not merely should the ECHR have an interpretive function and compliance with it should be an obligation on the part of organs of the Irish State other than the courts themselves, the Act said that compliance with the ECHR also required compliance with the judgments of the court of Strasbourg rather than simply the Irish interpretation of what the ECHR actually meant. I just make the point that there is nothing sacrosanct about the European Convention on Human Rights. It is a consensual convention to which the member states voluntarily adhere to the point where they can. The human rights legal community sometimes gets confused about this. It is wrong to accord it some kind of Supreme Court status for Ireland.”
“When Ireland, as part of the Good Friday Agreement, enacted legislation requiring interpretation of statutes and actions of official bodies to comply with the ECHR, it was done at a sub-constitutional level because the ECHR is not a sovereign convention binding on Ireland. It is a voluntary adherence to a convention. The Act made it clear, and judgments subsequently made it clear, that the Constitution is the fundamental law of this country and not the ECHR or the judgments of people in Strasbourg. I was Attorney General at the time the Act was formulated.”
“He arrived in Dublin via Belfast on the open border, exploiting the common travel area, and applied for asylum here. There is no accommodation for him. He is given vouchers for subsistence and is obliged to camp out in a tent supplied to him by a charity. He voluntarily chose to come to Ireland in the circumstances where Ireland was not in a position to offer him a higher standard of accommodation. Yet, if you apply the law of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg to his situation, as Mr. Justice Ferriter did, you end up in the situation where despite the fact that there was no emergency accommodation available when he opted voluntarily to come to Ireland, the Irish State ends up obliged to compensate him. That defies common sense.”
“I mentioned earlier, as did Senator Mullen the other day, that there can be occasions when jurisprudence brings us to outcomes that are almost inexplicable to the common sense of ordinary citizens. I am talking about the person to whom I and Senator Mullen made reference, a man who left India because of a dispute and threat to his life or whatever, because he had a relationship as a Christian with a Muslim woman. He convinced himself that the only way he could be safe was to migrate westward from India to avoid the threat to his life and limb from her relatives. He went to England and spent 17 months there. Something happened in his mind at the end of his 17 months in the United Kingdom and he decided to go to Dublin to claim asylum.”
“Likewise, if governments have a serious difficulty with where advanced - I use that phrase - jurisprudence of the court lands them in relation to how they deal with people regarded by them as a threat to national security, they have every right within the terms of the convention to address that issue. They do not just have to simply stand mute and say that is the state of international human rights law and there is nothing they can do about it. That is not the nature of the convention. The ECHR was a post-Second World War convention. It was designed to create a framework whereby member states undertook to one another to respect what were regarded at that stage as minimum guarantees of human rights, not maximal views of where human rights law could take us at the hands of activist judges.”
“It held against the Government of Switzerland, at the insistence of a group of old-age pensioners, that their health was damaged in a manner that contravened their personal rights under the convention due to the failure of the Swiss Government to take sufficient climate action policy decisions and implement them. The climate in Switzerland, as far as I am concerned, is not determined by the actions of the Swiss Government; the situation is slightly more complex than that. That kind of legal adventurism by the court shocked many people - that it would say a government of a sovereign state was infringing the convention by reason of its climate policies and that implementation of climate change controls was actionable in Strasbourg. It is activism of that kind that tends to discredit the European Court of Human Rights.”
“The 26 signatories of the letter include the United Kingdom, Denmark, Italy, Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden and Ukraine. It is not that the Minister's co-signing of that letter was some watering down of the ECHR. It was meeting the cumulative jurisprudence of the court of human rights in Strasbourg. The point I want to make in distinction to the attitude taken by Senator Stephenson is that there is nothing infallible about that court. It makes mistakes from time to time. It makes egregious mistakes on some rare occasions. I will give an example of an egregious mistake.”
“I do not agree with Senator Stephenson to some extent and I agree with her in other respects. The joint statement the Minister signed with a number of other countries was designed to bring some degree of common sense and reality to a situation in which overreach by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg had led to major difficulties for individual states in trying to balance national interests, including the right to deport somebody, with other entitlements of the proposed deportees. While Senator Stephenson referred to France, Germany and Spain not signing the statement, they reserved their position by adopting the position taken by the Council of Europe that further talks would take place in respect of the particular issues raised in the joint letter. It was not the Minister's solo run on this issue.”
“I move amendment No. 6: In page 20, between lines 17 and 18, to insert the following: “ “Common Travel Area” means the area consisting of the State, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and those dependencies in respect of which the nationals of either jurisdiction generally have freedom to travel from one jurisdiction to the other and to reside there without any visa or residence permit;”.”
“A Leas-Chathaoirligh, you may be interested to know I wanted to see what the President had signed and asked for a copy of the Act as signed into law by the President. I was informed a printed edition would not be available until an Irish translation was done of it. I do not know when that will be done. My office had to get a bound copy of what the President had signed compiled and I was charged €400 for a thing the size of an old phonebook. In the meantime it has been amended on an emergency basis so my bound volume is already out of date. My point is the size of a Bill does not mean it deserves less scrutiny. It deserves more scrutiny the bigger it is because the bigger it is, most likely, the more important it is.”
“In the spirit of the Minister stating he will comply with the requirements of the two Houses in the report required by the Standing Order of both Houses, and on the basis that the report, I hope, will not be a laconic, inadequate document but will really deal with the problems and realities of this legislation, it is not my intention to put this amendment to a vote in order to enable other amendments to be considered. The Minister said this is important legislation and that it is very big, which is true no matter what view you take of all its provisions. However, it cannot be the case that the bigger the Bill, the less scrutiny it gets. The Planning and Development Act 2024 was guillotined through as being hugely important and it was twice the size of this.”
“We cannot have a situation where minors can self-identify as being of a particular age in circumstances that lack credibility. The Minister has correctly pointed out that if you put 24- and 25-year-olds who claim to be aged 17 into accommodation with 12-, 15- and 16-year-olds, you are in breach of moral and legal obligations on that account as well. There has to be realism here. The Minister mentioned the pre-legislative scrutiny and I was there for a portion of that. I have to say, I was taken aback by people who said that the law should be that, in every circumstance, a claim of minority should be accepted by the State. That cannot possibly be right and it is not a common-sense thing to do.”
“In the circumstance that the Minister is undertaking to report, and I hope it will not be in a cursory way, 12 months after the enactment of this Bill, if it is passed by the Dáil and signed by the President, I want to put on the record of this House that I am taking him at his word. I am also relying on the Department of justice to comply with the Minister's instructions whereby the report not be a laconic couple of pages but will really state how the Act is actually working in all of its aspects. If, for instance, I am right about the border procedure centres not having been established I would like to see that the Department furnishes an explanation as to why it has not been done. Likewise, Members of this House have raised the question of determining the age of minors.”
“That is one of the most important aspects of this. If we rush this legislation through, the hard right will say that this Act was never even properly considered. We owe it to ourselves to take sufficient time with this legislation to dispel the proposition that it was run through the Oireachtas by a series of guillotines with the vast majority of it not being considered at all. The Minister said in relation to amendment No. 4 that it is his intention to comply with the obligations set out both in the Standing Orders of the Dáil and of the Seanad to make the report required of a Minister. He is not alone in this because as I said earlier it came as a surprise to me that was contained in the Standing Orders of this House.”
“The Irish State failed to provide him with proper accommodation and he had to live in a tent. He was compensated. The only point I am making is, we are legislating in the context of obligations to people of his kind but we have to be realistic. If someone chooses, having resided in the United Kingdom for 17 months, to come here and finds we do not have accommodation for him and he is obliged to live in a tent and to suffer on that account - and he did suffer on that account - the idea he can sue the Irish State for damages for failing to provide him with a proper roof and accommodation seems to me to be wrong. I mention that for this reason. If you guillotine legislation through, there are people out there, the hard right, who will exploit the fact this was rubber-stamped through the Oireachtas.”
“One of the accounts on the record of the High Court stated that one of the persons to whom compensation was given, and I would like this House to know it, was an Indian national who apparently, on the judge's finding, was claiming he was a Christian and had a relationship with a Muslim girl in India. As a result of this, her family or people associated with her had made threats to his safety and he had been forced to leave India. I will not talk about the credibility of having to leave a continent because of a particular threat to you by the members of a different religion but the point that was of huge significance was, that he - Mr. A - went to Europe thereafter, went to the United Kingdom, spent 17 months there and then chose to come to Ireland at a time when we were in the midst of our crisis.”
“There are all sorts of these questions and I find difficult to see how they could possibly be in operation during this calendar year. In the course of the debate the other day, there was some discussion on Committee Stage about the decision of the High Court, which dealt with compensation of persons who were inadequately housed at the height of the housing shortage, when tents were being put up around the city here in Dublin on an informal basis. One thing I want to say is, that the judgment of Mr. Justice Cian Ferriter in that matter - and I appreciate the Minister is minded to appeal and is therefore limited in what he can say on the subject - anonymised the two persons to whom damages were given, for good reason.”