Migration and Citizenship: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-30
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Jen Cummins (SD), Dublin South-Central

The role of migrants in this country, as my colleague has said, is so important. We go, people come - that is how it is. Our hospitals would not exist without people coming from all over the world. How would our restaurants manage? I would like to mention teachers who are coming here, people who want to set up life here because it is a great place to live. They want to work as teachers but it is incredibly difficult because the pathway through the Teaching Council is incredibly difficult. That is something we need to consider. We need to mature as a country, when we have people coming from elsewhere, as to how they can become teachers within our country. We want to broaden out that career for everybody. We want to make sure that those young people and their parents who are coming from migrant backgrounds can see teachers from other countries, not just from our own.
The categorisation of human beings is quite difficult. My own husband is a migrant. He came here because he loved Ireland. He thinks it is fantastic. However, there is a categorisation of who comes here and who is allowed to stay based on colour, where they come from, social class and lots of different things. We need to get a grip on that because as climate change happens there will be more and more people who come here. There will be more and more people who will have to come here. We only saw that from the heat in Europe this summer. People were dying because of that heat. We have a lovely temperature here, although it was also very hot. We are going to see that necessarily happening.
I will end on a positive note. The Minister of State was there at my husband's naturalisation ceremony in Killarney this year and it was an absolutely amazing day.
Over the course of that day, over 4,500 people became Irish citizens. As Deputy Rice said, since the new announcement has been made, a lot of people have come to my clinics to plead that they are here. They want to make a life here. They want to be citizens of this amazing country. We need to have a fair, humane and evidence-based approach to how we do naturalisation and immigration.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-30