May 2nd, 2024
The chickens are coming home to roost. Massive dissent is sweeping through Ireland as discontent with its immigration policy is increasing. Riots are now occurring in Dublin, and country districts are seeing arson of buildings housing asylum seekers.
ROSSLARE HARBOUR, Ireland, Dec 14 (Reuters) – On a poster placed near three hotels filled with asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees, the residents of the small Irish town of Rosslare Harbour have a blunt message for the government: “Enough is Enough”.
Their peaceful, carefully calibrated campaign against using a fourth hotel to house hundreds more asylum seekers could not be more different from that of the anti-immigrant activists who helped incite a riot in Dublin in late November.
But both underline an uncomfortable truth for the Irish establishment: immigration is now firmly on the political agenda and for the first time is likely to play a significant role in national elections, due by early 2025.
“Will it cause anti-immigrant or far-right parties to gain traction? Yes, I do believe that will happen,” said local residents’ group chair Bernie Mullen of government policies around placing arrivals in small towns without consultation.
Source Reuters December 14th, 2023.
Ireland says more than 80 per cent of asylum seekers are crossing the Irish border that Dublin fought hard to keep invisible and check-free after Brexit. It has provided no data, saying that the figure was based on officials’ expert assessment. The government insists a deal with London from 2020 will allow it to return such people to the UK, and it expects London to honour the agreement. But Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he was “not interested” in taking asylum seekers back from the EU via Ireland because France had refused to accept returns from the UK. The sight of pavements around Ireland’s International Protection Office lined with tents for several months has embarrassed the government in a nation that suffered mass emigration in the past but has been transformed by immigration. One in five legal residents today was born abroad.
Ireland’s net migration has more than tripled since 2021 and hit 77,600 in the year to April 2023 — the second-highest level since 1951 and the most since 2007 — as governments around Europe wrestle with the politics of handling migrant flows from poorer countries.
Source Financial Times May 2nd, 2024.
In the meantime, the Irish High Court had ruled that Ireland could not send asylum seekers who had arrived from the UK back to the UK as it was not a safe country because the returnees would be subject to being relocated to Rwanda, which in the views of the Irish Court is not a safe country, thus putting returnees to the UK at risk.
DUBLIN, April 30 (Reuters) – Ireland’s government said on Tuesday it planned to enact legislation by the end of May allowing it to resume sending asylum seekers back to the United Kingdom.
The Irish High Court ruled last month that Ireland could not send back people who arrive from the UK seeking asylum because the Irish government had not outlined whether they could be at risk on their return.
With differences over the issue growing between London and Dublin, Prime Minister Simon Harris set out plans for Justice Minister Helen McEntee to overcome the High Court ruling in remarks to parliament.
“The (justice) minister received permission (from cabinet) to draft legislation and intends to enact it by the end of the month and will lay out in the legislation how she intends to respond to the High Court,” Harris said.
He also urged London in earlier comments to stand by a 2020 agreement that allows for asylum seekers to be returned in either direction.
Justice Minister Helen McEntee said on Tuesday that Ireland had not returned anyone to the UK under the 2020 agreement because it had been suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequently faced a legal challenge.
Immigration is an increasingly important political issue in Ireland, where asylum applications have been rising sharply.
Plans by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to deport unlawful migrants to Rwanda without an opportunity to seek asylum in Britain raise particular issues for Ireland because it has a land border with the UK.
Britain expressed support on Monday for Ireland’s plans to enact legislation enabling it to resume returning asylum seekers to the UK, but Sunak cast doubt on the arrangement by saying he would not accept returning asylum seekers from the EU via Ireland.
Source Reuters April 30th, 2024.
If we go back a few years to the time of Brexit negotiations, we find Leo Varadkar (ex Taoiseach) playing hard ball and refusing a closed border with border checks. An open border was essential in maintaining the spirit and practice of the Good Friday agreement.
After the UK left the European Union, the Republic insisted aggressively that it would not tolerate as much as an extra camera at the Irish border. The former Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, warned that a harder frontier risked provoking violence and the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, claimed that infrastructure would breach the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. The Brexit backstop and then the Northern Ireland Protocol were eventually devised to meet these demands.
In fact, an international border existed before the UK’s departure from the EU, and it included occasional immigration spot checks. But it suited Varadkar and his colleagues’ narrative to imply that the frontier had disappeared completely thanks to the peace process and Brexit was threatening to bring it back.
Source CAPX May 1st, 2024.
The source goes on to discuss the current position. Bear in mind that Veradkar was threatening all sorts of repercussions against the UK if it did not support the open border conditions in 2019 and during the Brexit negotiations.
There could scarcely have been a bigger contrast with the Republic’s messaging this week.
Yesterday, for example, the Irish government announced that it would redeploy officers from An Garda Siochana, Ireland’s police force, at the border, to stop asylum seekers entering the Republic from Northern Ireland. The Irish Times reported that Ms McEntee updated the cabinet on measures required to prevent the ‘abuse’ of the Common Travel Area that allows free movement between the UK and Ireland.
This all sounded remarkably like the implementation of a harder border for immigration.
Meanwhile, the new Taoiseach, Simon Harris, claimed that the Republic already had an agreement with the UK, reached in 2020, to send immigrants back. His government would legislate to redesignate Britain a ‘safe country’ for asylum seekers, after Irish courts ruled that the Rwanda legislation rendered this designation contrary to EU law.
In response, Rishi Sunak was admirably direct and said that he was ‘not interested’ in any kind of returns deal, given that France would not accept asylum seekers who came to the UK from that jurisdiction. The backbencher, David Jones MP, summed up Conservatives’ lack of sympathy for Ireland’s position when he observed, ‘They wanted an open border, and they have an open border’.
In this instance, the Irish are justifiably being criticised for their hypocrisy.
Source CAPX.
In line with this habit of blaming everything on the UK, Dublin claims that the Rwanda Act is responsible for its recent flood of asylum seekers. The Republic has experienced rising anti-immigrant feeling, but its ministers cannot resist implying that the Irish are humane and progressive, while the Brits are intolerant and reactionary. The backlash in Ireland must ultimately be the fault of our government and its cruel plans to send asylum seekers to Africa.
The Republic’s current difficulties may be ironic or even deserved.
There is admittedly an element of theatre to Dublin’s threats to send asylum seekers back to Britain. The Irish government is under pressure to do something about the unprecedented increase in immigration. A surge of anti-immigrant feeling was responsible, in part, for Varadkar’s departure as premier. And the erection of a tented village outside the International Protection Office in Dublin, where claims for asylum are processed, has created a sense of panic among ministers.
Rather than address these problems directly, it seems that the Irish government wants to pick a fight with Britain to deflect public anger. It was telling that the Republic’s deputy prime minister, Micheal Martin, said this week that his administration’s claim that 80% of asylum seekers were arriving via Northern Ireland was not ‘statistical – it’s not a database or evidence base’. In other words, conveniently, this allegation against Britain need not even be proven.
The UK has given a firm response so far to Ireland’s attempt to shift blame for its migrant crisis. The Prime Minister has a responsibility to ensure that the spat does not rebound on Northern Ireland. He can do that best by preventing the province from becoming overrun with refugees and refusing to placate Dublin with an extra layer of Irish Sea border. This is the Republic of Ireland’s mess, caused by years of virtue-signalling on migration, and the Irish government should clear it up.
Source CAPX.
In short, the 80% figure for arrivals from Northern Ireland was plucked out of thin air and is totally unsubstantiated. The Irish Government have got themselves in a mess, with riots and civil unrest increasing throughout the country. All this is pushing anti-government sentiments, and the Irish Government is becoming more arrogant in its dealings with the UK but this time it isn’t working. A couple of years ago I caught the train from Dublin to Belfast and there were no identity checks and no border checks, we just travelled as if it was a single entity. There is no reason this shouldn’t continue if Ireland adopted a more vigorous attitude to immigration, except that this would require Ireland to stop sucking up to the EU.
As a final note, a well-known radical voice in the UK suggested that he could solve the Channel boat problem overnight. They said that all that was needed was for the UK Government to collect “asylum seekers” on arrival in UK waters and put them immediately on a flight to Belfast. There, they would be given a bus ticket to Dublin. This is taken straight from the playbook of USA border states shipping immigrants direct to Sanctuary cities.
