Brexit obsession blinds Ireland to its best option: joining the UK’s Rwanda scheme
In 2017, when Britain began its disengagement talks with the EU, Ireland laid down two inviolable principles. First, no Border: not so much as a matchstick to mark where the EU’s customs territory began. Second, no direct talks between London and Dublin. If the Brits had anything to say, they should talk to Michel Barnier. Funny how things work out. Over the past week, as asylum claims have surged, Irish politicians have begun to clamour for a bilateral returns arrangement with Britain. They say that 80pc of claimants are crossing from Northern Ireland to escape the threat of deportation to Rwanda. And they want those migrants turned back at the… well, the Border.
Hang on. Until practically last week, the Irish government was insisting that the Border be invisible. Even a traffic camera, of the kind found on every major road in Britain and Ireland, would supposedly risk a return to violence. Yet in reality, there was never the slightest prospect of Britain raising border infrastructure. It was the EU that claimed checks were needed to preserve its single market.
We in Britain bent over backwards to do it, accepting what amounted to an internal border on our own territory in order to accommodate a neighbouring country (and getting no thanks for it). Yet, after all that effort, Ireland last week suggested it was planning to deploy a hundred police officers at the Border, before apparently backing down.
Ireland’s politicians are aware of the irony. “This is the challenge, that we have advocated for an open border on this island,” says Justice Minister Helen McEntee. Still, we may be sure that Joe Biden won’t breathe a word of criticism. These border rows only ever work one way around. Britain is always in the wrong.
Funnily enough, the UK never wanted border checks in the first place. When Irish self-government was being negotiated in 1920, David Lloyd George held out until the last minute for a common customs territory, arguing as a “Gladstonian Home Ruler” that it was impractical to have tariffs within the British Isles. But the Provisional Government insisted on customs posts.
Since the Belfast Agreement was negotiated in 1998, there have been two attempts to impose a hard border. Neither came from UK.
The first was during the foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001 when Ireland (not unreasonably, given the importance of its beef industry) sent hundreds of security officers to the Border. The other was in 2021 when the EU, piqued because Britain’s vaccine roll-out was faster than its own, ordered the Border to be shut – a decision it had to reverse hours later. Even bigger than the volte-face over the Border is Ireland’s abandonment of the idea that policies within EU competence must not be discussed bilaterally. Again, this principle was laid down very clearly during the Brexit talks.
“Negotiations can only happen between the UK and EU,” said the then taoiseach, Leo Varadkar. “We are not going to allow negotiations to move to an intergovernmental level in any way.” Britain reluctantly accepted that principle.
Yet Ireland is now demanding an intergovernmental deal with the UK on the return of immigrants. In other words, Britain would be obliged to take illegal immigrants back from Ireland, but unable to return them to France.
Plainly, no British government should agree to that. Any returns agreement would have to be between the UK and the EU as a whole. I have no doubt that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak would be happy to take back illegal entrants from the EU who had first come to the UK, but only if it worked both ways.
The trouble is that Brussels has little interest in such a deal. It wants Britain to join its burden-sharing scheme, whereby asylum-seekers are spread around the member states.
I have a lot of sympathy with Ireland – both in general (I am, as you might infer from my name, one of six million Brits of Irish descent) and on the issue of illegal immigration.
The same pull factors that draw people to Britain, in particular low unemployment and the English language, make Ireland the obvious destination as Britain finally gets serious about deportations. That population movement is no fairer from an Irish than a British point of view. We both have relatively generous immigration regimes, but those regimes are undermined by illicit entrants.
If Britain really were the villain that Irish politicians say it is, it would detain boat people on their arrival in Kent, house them in an asylum centre in Newry and point them to the Border. But that is not the country we are. We want Ireland to solve this problem alongside us – which would also, incidentally, help France by reducing the flow of people to Calais.
The best course for Ireland would be to pursue the Rwanda scheme with the UK. Sadly, Ireland’s leaders seem to have determined that collaboration with the EU, whatever its cost, is always preferable to working with the UK.
Meanwhile, other European countries are moving towards their own versions of the Rwanda-style plan, considering third-country destinations for deportations, and the federalist European People’s Party has endorsed the idea.
How bizarre it would be if, just as the rest of Europe is coming around to Britain’s way of thinking, Keir Starmer were to follow through on his commitment and scrap the scheme.
Where do you suppose that would incentivise illegal immigrants in Europe to move? No wonder Brussels wants a Labour victory. (© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2024)
Daniel Hannan is a Conservative peer in the House of Lords