Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I strongly oppose the guillotining of the International Protection Bill. It beggars belief that a Bill with such profound implications for those seeking human rights protection in this State should be brutally guillotined on Second Stage today, with Remaining Stages probably rammed through next week. This Bill would abolish the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner and have its responsibilities subsumed under the Department of Justice and Equality, thereby annihilating even a semblance of independence. The Bill would effectively remove the option of the State to grant leave to remain in Ireland on humanitarian grounds to those whose initial applications are unsuccessful. For those people, this is a rapid deportation Bill providing that applications for refugee protection may be rammed through on a fast-track basis, with those who are not initially successful denied effective recourse to the courts to challenge their threatened deportation. This effectively rules out leave to remain on humanitarian grounds. Many Deputies have lobbied on behalf of various individuals seeking leave to remain because it was correct to do so. The idea is that the whole process will be rammed through in nine months.

The Labour Party has said loudly over recent months that it will end the discredited and inhuman direct provision system for refugee status applicants. Now, in a move that can only be called Orwellian, it proposes to meet the objections to and repugnance towards the direct provision arrangement not by making it humane and changing it fundamentally, but by kicking out of the State anybody who, after a period of months, is not granted leave to remain without giving him or her further recourse to the courts or even the Minister and State to seek leave to remain on humanitarian grounds. It is grotesque in the extreme.

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