Ireland should have stayed out of the EU

ONCE upon a time, you could fly from London to Dublin and walk off the plane straight into the airport, as if it were Glasgow or Belfast. Nobody asked for your documents. This civilised arrangement was the result of the Common Travel Area, a sensible attempt by London and Dublin to treat each other as friends after the horrors of the War of Independence a century ago.

But, at some point I can’t identify, this ended. Now stern-faced immigration officers demand a passport. This is pointless.

A few years ago I made an experiment and managed to travel by ship and train to Dublin, via Larne and Belfast. And nobody asked me for any kind of document when I crossed the frontier. If I were up to no good, that is the way I would go.

Dublin has, in recent years, made a sort of fetish of pretending that there is no land border between the Republic and the

North. The old customs points on border stations have gone. There are no signs on the roads announcing that you are entering the Republic, only speed limit warnings in kilometres.

And now, thanks to Dublin’s curious attitude to the EU, this is all going wrong. It has always fascinated me that Ireland, having fought like a tiger for independence from London, sank so readily into being ruled from Brussels. So it cannot (as once it would have done) simply join in our

Rwanda scheme. Shall we now see roadblocks on the Irish side, to keep illegal migrants from evading compulsory flights to Kigali? As far as I know, the first customs points in modern Ireland were set up in

1923 by the Irish Free State, not by London, so it would not be the first time.

I’m actually quite sorry for the people of Ireland at the moment, so badly led for so long, lacking much in the way of opposition or real debate in their politics. I can’t help thinking this mess would have been avoided if both our countries had stayed out of the Common Market in the 1970s, and Dublin had not gone soft on Sinn Fein in the 1990s.