In 2017, when Britain began its disengagement negotiations with the EU, Ireland laid down two inviolable principles. First, no border: not even a match to mark the start of the EU customs territory. Second, no direct negotiations between London and Dublin. If the British had something to say, they should speak to Michel Barnier.
It’s funny how things happen. Over the past week, as asylum applications have increased, Irish politicians have begun calling for a bilateral return deal with Britain. They claim 80 per cent of claimants cross the border from Northern Ireland to escape the threat of deportation to Rwanda. And they want these migrants to be turned back at the… well, at the border.
“They are leaving the UK and taking advantage of opportunities to come to Ireland, crossing the border to find refuge here and within the European Union, as opposed to the possibility of being deported to Rwanda,” Micheál Martin said , now deputy prime minister. minister.
Hang in there. Until almost last week, Martin, along with other TDs, insisted that the border was invisible. Even a traffic camera, as found on all main roads in Britain and Ireland, would supposedly risk a return to violence.
Yet in reality there has never been any prospect of Britain strengthening its border infrastructure. It was the EU that said controls were necessary to preserve its single market. But, for some reason, the rest of the world, as well as part of Remainer opinion, stubbornly refused to understand this point, and it somehow became the responsibility of the Britain to prevent the EU from increasing customs duties.
We went out of our way to do it, agreeing to what amounted to an internal border on our own territory in order to accommodate a neighboring country (and receiving no thanks). Yet after all this effort, all the hassle of red lanes and “not for sale in the EU” stickers, Ireland has hinted that it is considering deploying around 100 police officers to the border, before apparently doing so. reverse.
Ulster Unionists ironically point out that these officers were needed half a century ago. A hundred peelers along the border would have been useful when IRA units used to retreat into the Republic to regroup. But as Unionists learned long ago, international pressure is never brought to bear on Dublin.
Irish politicians themselves are aware of the irony of this situation. “This is the challenge we have championed for an open border on this island,” said Justice Minister Helen McEntee. We can nevertheless be sure that Joe Biden will not utter a word of criticism. These border lines only work in one direction. Britain is always wrong.
Oddly enough, the UK never wanted border controls. When Irish self-government was being negotiated in 1920, David Lloyd George resisted a common customs territory until the last minute, arguing as “Sovereign of Gladston” that it was impractical to have customs tariffs within the British Isles. But the Irish provisional government insisted on setting up customs posts.
Since the negotiation of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, there have been two attempts to impose a hard border. Neither were from the UK.
The first occurred during the foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001, when Ireland (not unreasonably given the importance of its cattle industry) sent hundreds of security guards to the border. The other happened in 2021 when the EU, stung because Britain’s vaccine rollout was faster than its own, ordered the border closed – a decision it had to reverse within hours later.
Even more serious than the border U-turn is Ireland’s abandonment of the idea that policies falling within the EU’s remit should not be discussed bilaterally. Here again, this principle was stated very clearly during the Brexit negotiations.
“Negotiations can only take place between the UK and the EU,” said Leo Varadkar, then Taoiseach. “We are under no circumstances going to allow the negotiations to reach an intergovernmental level.” Britain reluctantly accepted this principle. I say “reluctantly” because Varadkar’s predecessor, Enda Kenny, was willing to have technical discussions about how to keep the border open.
These talks were beginning to produce results. But Varadkar was not interested in pragmatic solutions. He apparently wanted Brexit to be canceled or, if that proved impossible, to at least be punished. He aimed to achieve this by overturning what he saw as a historical imbalance of power. Instead of being the stronger party in negotiations with Ireland, Britain would be the weaker party in negotiations with the EU.
-Yet Ireland is now demanding an intergovernmental agreement with the UK on the return of immigrants. In other words, Britain would be obliged to take back illegal immigrants from Ireland, but could not send them back to France.
Clearly no UK government should accept this. Any return deal would need to be between the UK and the EU as a whole. I have no doubt that Rishi Sunak would be happy to take back illegal EU immigrants who arrived first in the UK, but only if it worked both ways.
The problem is that Brussels has little interest in such a deal, as more undocumented migrants pass through EU territory to Britain than the other way around. Instead, he wants Britain to adhere to its burden-sharing system, under which asylum seekers are distributed among member states.
We would be crazy to participate, given our geography. Although our headlines may not suggest it, we have fewer asylums per capita than most EU states.
In the last year we were covered by the EU return program, 2020, this worked against us. We tried to refer 8,502 rejected applicants to EU states, but they only accepted 105 (1.2 percent). Instead, they sought to send 2,331 rejected applicants here and we accepted 882 (37.8 percent).
Surprisingly, Starmer’s policy is to return to such an arrangement. Indeed, he sees it as an objective rather than a concession. Unsurprisingly, the EU has no interest in a return deal with Sunak while it has the prospect of getting what it wants from Starmer.
I have a lot of sympathy for Ireland – both in general (I am, as my name might infer, one of six million Britons of Irish descent) and on the issue of illegal immigration. The same pull factors that draw people to Britain, including low unemployment and the English language, make Ireland the obvious destination as Britain finally gets serious about deportations.
“I don’t want to go back to Africa,” said one asylum seeker interviewed this week in Dublin. “Rwanda is not good for me. I am here to build a new life in Europe. He had traveled from Calais via London and Belfast – one of the first of what could turn into a wave of people once flights start leaving for Kigali.
This population movement is no more equitable from an Irish point of view than from a British point of view. We both have relatively generous immigration regimes, but these regimes are undermined by illegal entry.
If Britain really was the villain Irish politicians claim it would be, it would arrest boat people on arrival in Kent, house them in an asylum center in Newry and direct them to the border. But that’s not the country we are. We want Ireland to resolve this problem alongside us – which would also help France, by reducing the flow of people to Calais.
The best solution for Ireland would be to pursue the Rwandan project jointly with the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, Irish leaders appear to have determined that working with the EU, whatever the cost, is always preferable to working with the UK.
Meanwhile, other European countries are moving toward their own versions of the Rwanda-style system, considering third-country destinations for deportations, and the federalist European People’s Party has endorsed the idea.
It would be truly bizarre if Starmer, at a time when the rest of Europe is rallying to the British way of thinking, follows through on his commitment and abandons the project.
Where do you think this would encourage illegal immigrants in Europe to settle? It is no wonder that Brussels wants a Labor victory.
