Donald, your wall won’t stop people getting in
Leo issues warning
‘They’ll dig tunnels and put up ladders’
DONALD Trump’s border wall with Mexico will not stop people from digging tunnels and climbing ladders, the Taoiseach warned yesterday.
After the US president delivered a State of the Union address on Tuesday urging support for building the Mexico-US wall, Leo Varadkar said any effective wall would have to be ‘highly fortified and policed’.
But the Taoiseach cited the ‘awful’ wall between Israel and Palestine as an example of what not to do. He also said German officials understand Ireland’s wish not to have a hard border between North and South due to their experience with a divided west and east Berlin.
The Taoiseach, speaking in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on his African trip, said: ‘Obviously any decision on whether a wall is built between Mexico and the US is a matter for the US government and the Mexican government, of course. But my experience is that walls don’t stop people.
‘People dig tunnels and people use ladders, and unless it is highly fortified and highly policed, it is not going to be effective.
‘There is an effective wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories, but I don’t think anybody would want to see that kind of wall built anywhere else in the world. I’ve seen it and it’s awful – I wouldn’t like to see anything like that built anywhere else in the world.’
However, he added: ‘That’s not my call – it’s a border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland that I’m working on avoiding at the moment. That’s my priority.’
Mr Varadkar noted that German foreign minister Heiko Maas had said in Dublin this week that Germany supported Ireland on the critical need for the avoidance of a hard border on our island due to the Germans’ own experience, including with walls.
The Taoiseach said: ‘Generally speaking I don’t believe in building walls. I believe in building bridges.
‘And when we’ve been discussing Brexit and the need to avoid a hard border, among the people who have intuitively understood the issue are, of course, the Germans because of their history of partition and of course because a wall was put up between west and east Berlin.
‘They really understand it in a way that would be harder for other countries.
‘It’s one of the reasons we have had such strong understanding and support from the German government.’
Mr Varadkar also said nothing more had been heard about a possible visit to Ireland by Mr Trump after the US president cancelled a trip here last November. He said: ‘Obviously I will be in the White House in March to meet President Trump, but we have had no contact from them about a renewed visit to Ireland at this stage.’