Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 14 October 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Home Affairs and Migration
General Scheme of the International Protection Bill 2025: Discussion
2:00 am
Mr. Liam Herrick:
That would raise significant issues in terms of the rights to privacy of children and the particular sensitivities regarding children as vulnerable people more generally. The issue of age assessment is of grave concern to us. In our legal work, we are involved in a number of cases, under the current legal regime, relating to people who have been assessed as adults and are asserting they are children, and we are supporting them. We are now talking about greatly compressing the time in which those assessments are made. We have no visibility on what the multidisciplinary mechanism will be. It is obvious to us that there is a very heightened risk that children will be inappropriately assessed as adults and there might be an increase in that category. That will mean that they will be put into the border procedure, which means that they will be subject to processing and deportation within a very short period of time.
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