Ireland’s asylum quandary
The utter confusion over how to deal with asylum seeking in Europe has been exposed by the attempts of Ireland to send back immigrants arriving from the UK. The Irish government blames the impact of the Rwanda policy for a huge increase in numbers crossing the open border on the island.
Not only is this a tacit acceptance that the prospect of deportation to the African republic is acting as a deterrent, it also raises an obvious question. If Ireland can return asylum seekers to the UK on the grounds that it is safe then why can we not send them back to France?
The Irish courts have ruled any relocation to the UK to be unlawful because of the risk of an asylum seeker being sent to Rwanda. But the Dublin government is now proposing emergency legislation to overrule the courts, just as the Conservative government has done here.
On what basis would the UK be required to accept immigrants deported from Ireland? Moreover, as it is an open border under the common travel area agreement that continued after Brexit, what would prevent someone simply going back again?
The Irish say 80 per cent of illegal arrivals are from the UK yet the same might be said of the cross-Channel traffic from France to Britain. Since Ireland is an EU member state, is it the policy of the bloc to remove asylum seekers to safe countries whence they came and, if so, why cannot France take them back?
