Coalition partners at war over immigration as Fine Gael throws down gauntlet

17/11/2025

The Coalition partners are at war over immigration as Fine Gael senators call for speedier action.

Tensions are expected to accelerate between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael after the ‘curious’ decision by the junior Coalition partner to table a Seanad motion on the sensitive issue.

The performance of FF Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan on the matter is believed to have propelled him to the top of the party’s succession stakes.

One FF source said: ‘It is a curious decision. Immigration is an ongoing, simmering issue. Responsible Coalition partners do not, if they are intelligent, raise hares on matters like this.

‘Though it has been disguised by the ongoing Fianna Fáil leadership crisis and the Housing Plan, privately tensions have been growing between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over what is being seen as an attempt by Fine Gael to seize control of the immigration issue.’

The issue intensified in the wake of last month’s Citywest riots in south Dublin, when Tánaiste Simon Harris said: ‘Our migration numbers are too high, and I think that is really an issue that needs to be considered in a very serious way by Government.’

Mr Harris, whose party held the Justice portfolio from 2011 to 2025, warned: ‘One of the reasons they are so high is that there are too many people who come to this country and are told they do not have a right to be here, and it is taking too long for them to leave the country.’

He added: ‘We have to listen to people of this country, who I believe are saying we used to live in a country where 2,000 to 3,000 people sought international protection each year.’

The Fine Gael Private Members motion also raises the issue of the scale of the numbers, warning: ‘There are genuine concerns by local communities around the provision of international protection. Ireland, like every other democratic state, is not immune from the threat of violent extremism.’

But it also notes that ‘since February 2022, over 120,000 people fleeing the war in Ukraine have been granted temporary protection in Ireland, with an estimated 83,000 remaining resident in the State’ and ‘nearly 33,000 people, of whom over 9,000 are children, are being accommodated in international protection accommodation (IPAS)’, compared to the end of 2021, where ‘IPAS accommodated just over 7,000 people and numbers increased during an unprecedented surge in applications from 2022 to 2024’.

One senior FF source said: ‘We are not happy. We inherited a shambolic mess in 2025. We are starting to put some shape and discipline on it and Fine Gael are engaged in grand larceny of our policies. They make Sinn Féin look consistent.’

In an indication of fury within the party, it is believed Mr O’Callaghan will ‘personally take on the Fine Gael motion on Wednesday’. A source said that normally, ‘full ministers are far too grand to take Seanad Private Members motions from Fine Gael, some mere minister of state is sent, but Jim is keen to take this one’.

Another FF minister said: ‘The cheek is immense. We are actually injecting extra impetus and spending after a decade of drift.’

The Fine Gael motion, signed by all its senators, will call for investment in ‘additional resources to ensure that we can quickly process visa and immigration permissions’.

It will also call for the Minister ‘to remain responsive to our economic needs, including our skills needs across the health and care, agriculture, construction and multinational sectors’.

It will warn that we need to ‘continue to implement a firmer migration system that enhances border security, streamlines processing, ensures faster removals, and protects the integrity of our immigration framework’.

It calls on the State to move ‘from relying on private providers towards a core of State-owned accommodation’ and to ‘require international protection applicants to contribute towards their accommodation costs’.

It will also call on Mr O’Callaghan to ‘ensure people who arrive here from safe countries, with false or no documents, or who have crossed borders illegally are subject to an accelerated processing system so that decisions are made quickly’