A Government backbencher has urged Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan to reduce the planned waiting time for family reunification applications from three years to one.
Fine Gael TD Naoise Ó Muirí said last year 153 spouses were granted permission to come to Ireland under arrangements for people granted international protection, out of “123,000 plus” people who entered Ireland in 2025.
“That’s just 0.12 per cent of that total, yet their presence plays a crucial role in helping those who get protection restore a sense of normality and security to their own lives.”
Acknowledging the current system “is under significant strain and requires reform” he said it was still “essential we find a balance between improving efficiency and upholding the rights of applicants and in line with our own history, taking a humane approach to this issue”.
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The Dublin Bay North TD was speaking during the ongoing debate on the controversial International Protection Bill, a major reform of asylum law to bring it into line with the EU Migration and Asylum Pact.
The measures include cutting the time limit for asylum decisions to six months, with three months for a first decision and three for an appeal. The legislation establishes an appeals tribunal with fewer oral hearings and greater use of video testimony.
The Bill also expands powers for arrest and detention including for minors and obliges refugees granted protection to wait three years before applying for family reunification. It also requires them demonstrate financial self-sufficiency.
Sinn Féin’s Darren O’Rourke said the Government had “signed up to a one size fits all EU system, ignoring the unanimous cross-party recommendation of the Oireachtas Justice Committee” to reconsider opting in to the majority of the pact.
“This is a profound failure of political judgment,” the Meath East TD said.
His party colleague Pearse Doherty said the Government has “signed up Ireland wholesale to a pact that transfers decision making power away from the State and into EU-level mechanisms” which are “ill-suited to Ireland’s position”.
The Sinn Féin finance spokesman said “Ireland is not a typical EU member state”, sharing a common travel area and a land border with a state outside the EU.
He said Government officials acknowledged at the Justice Committee “that there was no meaningful consideration of the Common Travel Area”.
Labour’s Conor Sheehan criticised what he called the Government’s “performative politics”.
He said arguments “that are fundamentally just racist are being legitimised. And the Government are trying out this performative tough-on-immigration stance and undermining human rights in the process”.
He claimed the Government “has made no attempt at presenting the positive case for migration, and very little attempt at combating the misinformation and some of the outright lies that have been spread by people who are seeking to cause division within communities over the last number of years”.
Social Democrats TD Aidan Farrelly said “the Bill legislates for the detention of children” with not a single children’s rights safeguarding measure in place.
The former youth worker who worked with children and young people in direct provision, said one section allows for the detention of an unaccompanied minor “in exceptional circumstances and as a measure of last resort”.
He said there was no clarity about exceptional circumstances with “the risk of imposing lifelong harm on children by detaining them”.
People Before Profit leader Richard Boyd Barrett said the Trump administration is scapegoating vulnerable immigrants including Irish people “in the most horrendous way”.
But the Irish Government is “leaning into that stuff. It is not as absolutely blatant and obscene what he is doing and but it is leaning into it and the human consequences are appalling,” he said.
