A biker friend recently vroomed up the length of England to Scotland, took the ferry from Stranraer to Belfast port, then crossed back and forth into the Republic during an extended tour of the Irish relatives. All without a single official ID check. Even he – a young liberal of Irish heritage, well-informed legally and culturally on border matters – was surprised enough to mention it.
He had read the guidance in the ferry company’s email: “Irish and British citizens travelling on our Irish Sea routes do not need a passport to travel to Britain or Ireland but are advised to take a form of identity. A valid passport, photographic driving licence, international student card, government issued photo ID cards, health insurance/social security photographic cards, photographic bus/train pass or EU Citizen Identity Card will usually suffice.”
He packed at least three of those documents. Apart from an “extremely cursory” security inspection in Stranraer – an “0.5 second check” on the box on the back of the bike - no one asked to see any of them. No one checked the ID of this “single, unvetted, military age male” as he might be labelled in certain circles. Perhaps security checks in the Common Travel Area (CTA) are really that weak.
The fact that he was checked even for half a second is surprising. For last Monday’s piece on the CTA – under which British and Irish citizens are entitled to travel without a passport between the Republic and the UK and to live and work freely in both - Mark Hennessy talked to a former senior UK Border Force official. Immigration officers would “occasionally” be put on duty at Stranraer to monitor passengers getting off the Larne ferry, said David Wood. Using powers of reasonable suspicion, officers would stop people if they were “acting furtively, or if they had no luggage when everyone else had. But it’s all a subjective call.”
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It’s also very delicate. The British have been peppering for decades about the CTA and “porous borders” – but so have the Irish. Almost 20 years ago when terrorists were bombing Britain, then minister for justice Dermot Ahern was concerned that Ireland could be used as “a backdoor to England” but said he couldn’t find “common cause” with London. At the same time the UK prime minister Tony Blair was trying to introduce a national biometric ID card in the hope of a parallel Irish scheme to secure the external frontier of the CTA and the rights of British and Irish citizens within it. Blair’s plan was scrapped by the Tories. The Irish scheme became the Public Services Card (PSC) which stumbles on as proof of identity in some circumstances. It is certainly not a national ID card.
The growing complexity of simultaneously controlling immigration, preserving the Common Travel Area and keeping the Border open was highlighted by the 2023 itinerary of Hadi Alodid, the 30-year-old Sudanese man now facing charges of attempted murder in Belfast. He made his way somehow from Sudan to Paris, then flew to Dublin, where he presumably walked through immigration and then stepped on to a bus to Belfast where he claimed UK asylum.
So Ireland may still be a “back door to England” but according to official figures, Northern Ireland is now the back door to the Republic. Nearly 88 per cent of those who claimed asylum here last year – 11,557 people – are believed to have arrived via Northern Ireland. That compares with 1,590 who arrived here via air or seaports.
In this light the benign to-ing and fro-ing of the CTA seems to belong to another era. Though not often mentioned, the lack of identity cards is considered a major pull factor drawing migrants into the UK and Ireland. Twenty years ago, Ibec’s financial sector group suggested that ID cards could help halt money laundering and funding of subversive organisations. Human trafficking can now be added to the list. Messy CTA-related concerns include the potential for abuse of the CTA’s rights to work and welfare benefits.
Nearly 10 years ago amid fears that the PSC was a Trojan horse for a national ID system, opposition was mainly on liberal, ideological grounds. One staunch opponent, Senator Michael McDowell – who was in government when the PSC was introduced in 2004 - suggested that national ID cards “alter the citizen’s relationship with the State because in the end it will become more and more mandatory to have it and carry it and all the rest of it”.
Yet somehow 25 of the 27 EU member states issue a national ID card to their citizens without regular spontaneous combustion. More than half make ownership of cards compulsory but differ about the obligation to carry them. Some, such as Sweden and Finland, make it entirely optional. The only two which don’t have cards at all are Ireland and Denmark – but what Danish citizens have instead is a national identification number in a centralised digital system.
Ireland is the EU outlier.
A national ID system indisputably comes with the price of surveillance. But the effort to square the growing complexity of global human movements with benign agreements from another era requires something more than a stark “No to ID cards” mantra.
It deserves an honest national conversation.
