Michael Collins (born 26 February 1968)[citation needed] is an Irish politician who has been a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Cork South-West constituency since the 2016 general election.

[14][15][16] He also stated that asylum seekers should be held in "holding bays" like in Australia, that the burqa should be banned in schools and that Travellers should not be legally recognised an ethnic minority.

[14][15][17] In 2015, following his announcement that he intended to run in the 2016 general election, it emerged that, in 2013, Collins had provided a character reference for an acquaintance's son who was appearing in court and was later convicted of a child sex offence.

[20] For that, both he and Grealish were criticised in Irish political circles, with Labour leader Brendan Howlin calling the pair "highly dangerous",[21][22][23] and Irish President Michael D. Higgins, while not directly referring to them, publicly rejected their rhetoric, suggesting that it was not factual that immigrants were replacing people in Ireland, and that immigrants accounted for a high percentage of Ireland's GDP.

[25][26] In June 2020, during global protests over the murder of George Floyd, Collins was criticised, alongside Danny Healy-Rae, when both TDs used the slogan "All Lives Matter".

Shane Curry of the Irish Network Against Racism said he found it hard to believe that both Collins and Healy-Rae were naive about the meaning of the slogan and didn't know that many people use the phrase as a refutation of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

[27] During the same period, Collins rejected calls for statues and plaques commemorating historic figures involved in the transatlantic slave trade be removed.