THE BIG READ: The snide Irish political establishment is getting its comeuppance
Unless France agrees to take back irregular migrants it has been funneling into the UK, it is the Irish who will end up getting the booby prize in an unedifying game of pass-the-parcel
A FEW weeks ago the Irish political establishment was engaged in another bout of doing what it likes doing best – being sour and snide towards the United Kingdom.
A decision in Ireland’s High Court ruled that the UK was not a safe place to remove migrants to under EU law because of the risk that they would be sent to Rwanda.
The verdict gave the Irish establishment some welcome relief from their own embarrassment after the Irish people had massively rejected their trendy-lefty plans to amend the constitution to water down references to marriage and the responsibilities of women in the home.
Once more they could regard themselves as forward-looking “progressives” and mock their reactionary next-door neighbours who proposed sending irregular migrants to Africa.
Former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had even managed to find a way to back EU proposals to remove migrants to other countries for processing, while still looking down his nose at the UK.
“We’re saying very strictly that anything that’s done has to be in line with Geneva conventions and also the European Convention on Human Rights. So it’s not the European version of what the UK is proposing in Rwanda,” he said.
That was in March. We are not even out of April yet and already this latest pyramid of conceited piffle has collapsed.
Far from continuing to dub the UK unconscionably cruel over its Rwanda plan, the Irish government is suddenly rushing through new laws to set aside its own High Court’s ruling and declare the UK a safe country to send asylum seekers back to.
The response follows Ireland’s deputy PM Micheal Martin revealing that in recent weeks more than 80 per cent of asylum claims in his country have come from people who have crossed the unguarded border with Northern Ireland.
And he is in no doubt what has driven the stampede: the UK’s Rwanda policy is already “impacting on Ireland”, he says, because irregular migrants fear being detained in the UK and put on a plane to central Africa.
The irony here is delicious. It was of course Ireland that weaponised the issue of its frontier with Northern Ireland to undermine the UK position in Brexit talks. It remorselessly cranked up the pressure on the issue until feeble Theresa May accepted an obligation that not only must the UK not impose a “hard” border, but it also must not adopt any Brexit position that left the EU thinking it needed to impose one itself.
Once she signed up to that, Britain was in effect prisoner of the European Commission in regard to the sort of Brexit that could be achieved.
Yet now it is the Irish who are the ones complaining of the implications of an entirely unguarded and open border – this just a few months after Varadkar boasted that full reunification was only a matter of time. And it is the Irish, who have never once suggested that France ought to take back irregular migrants who have crossed the English Channel into the UK, who now demand that the UK should take back such people who have crossed the land border into their country.
Fortunately, the British Government seems to be having none of it – so far. Downing Street sources have briefed lobby journalists that there is no chance of Rishi Sunak agreeing to take back migrants from Ireland until France agrees to take them back from the UK.
One doesn’t have to be a hardened cynic to fear the UK authorities collapsing on this issue one day. But surely that day will not come before a general election in which Sunak’s failure thus far to “stop the boats” is one of his weakest suits. In other words, to be seen to collapse to pressure from our minnow-sized neighbour to the West, while paying our larger neighbour to the South-East huge sums for it to wave off dinghies bound for the English coast is just not practical politics. He simply must hold the line.
So even when Ireland passes a law setting aside the previous judgment of its highest court (sound familiar?) about the safety of the UK, this will still not allow it to send asylum seekers forcibly back to us. And that is without even considering the potential for asylum seekers to levy their own appeals against removal with the European Court of Human Rights.
When the Rwanda scheme was first announced by Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, two years ago, some critics suggested that the land border with Ireland would become the new weak link if the cross-Channel boats were deterred. The theory was that migrants no longer able to sail across La Manche would just get a flight into Ireland, wander northwards across the unprotected border and then claim asylum in the UK and never leave.
The fact that this human arbitrage process has already occurred the other way around, with a large North to South movement being recorded, suggests that the Rwanda policy really could have an all-encompassing deterrent effect should it actually get properly going.
The vista facing the Irish authorities is hence not a pretty one. There is every chance of much greater numbers of asylum-seekers piling into the Republic of Ireland from the north, in order to evade detention by the UK authorities and subsequent removal to Rwanda. This seems likely to happen irrespective of what laws Ireland passes declaring the UK a safe country for migrants.
So Ireland will only be able to do two potentially effective things. The first would be
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