Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That is useful. I flagged it because I thought committee members would want to apprise themselves of where things are at, or not at. We can write to the board of the children's hospital and ask if it has imposed the 15% sanction to try to move this along. That is the only stick it has at this stage. We can also ask if it has received an updated timeline for substantial completion, if it is still there. When it says there is 64% performance going back over recent years, a further question is what the current performance over the past three months is. That would be a way of getting a measurement of it. Would that be okay? We will ask those three questions of the board and we will put it on the work programme. We note and publish the correspondence and will look for that and put it on the work programme.

Next is No. R2729, received from Ms Oonagh McPhillips, Secretary General, Department of Justice. This is correspondence to the committee providing further information on the designation of safe countries of origin. I propose we note and publish this item. Is that agreed? Agreed. I have flagged this item for discussion. Very briefly, there was one thing I found unusual from the point of view of the Oireachtas and our work as a committee. We do not want to disadvantage people who are coming from unsafe countries. That is important. However, a lot of people were surprised to see there were only eight countries designated as safe. Two more were added and there was a lot of publicity and fanfare about it. Still, a relatively small number of countries are deemed to be safe. I think there is a question mark over that. The correspondence reads:

A country that has been designated under section 72 of the Act as a safe country of origin shall, for the purposes of the assessment of an application for international protection, be considered to be a safe country of origin in relation to a particular applicant only where— a) the country is the country of origin of the applicant, and

b) the applicant has not submitted any serious grounds for considering the country not to be a safe country of origin in his or her particular circumstances and in terms of his or her eligibility for international protection.

I just felt that was strange. If I read it correctly, it seems that it is almost the applicant who decides whether it is a safe country. It states, "Applicants from safe countries have the same rights to have their cases considered on their merits and have the right to appeal a first-instance decision to the International Protection Appeals Tribunal". We might say that is fair enough. However, that statement under b) at the bottom of the first page is peculiar. I do not know what other members think of it. It seems to leave a question as to what is considered safe. We do not want to disadvantage people who are fleeing war, persecution or famine but that point b) seems to be open to interpretation.