“Rwanda threat is pouring migrants into Ireland,” screamed the headline on the front page of Friday’s Daily Telegraph.
Leaning on quotes from Tánaiste Micheál Martin, the Tory-leaning British broadsheet picked up on the surprising statistic disclosed by the Irish Government this week that 80 per cent of recent asylum seekers arriving into the State had crossed over the Border from Northern Ireland.
The newspaper jumped on Martin’s linking the influx to the UK government’s controversial policy of threatening to deport migrants to the central African nation of Rwanda, a policy that was passed by Westminster on Tuesday.
“Maybe that’s the impact it was designed to have,” Martin was quoted by the Telegraph as saying.
The report gave voice to concerns about an open border into the Republic and the impact of a contentious immigration policy in a neighbouring country and the movement of migrants into this one.
“Irish people like a degree of common sense,” Taoiseach Simon Harris told the Oireachtas finance committee on Wednesday. “It is important in the weeks and months ahead to show the people of this country that we have a rules-based migration system.”
Harris was speaking the day after his Minister for Justice Helen McEntee put in a patchy performance at the Oireachtas justice committee, which gave rise to several key moments.
She was unable to give a clear answer to Independent TD Michael McNamara over why asylum seekers had not been returned to countries willing to accept them, and then made the stark assertion that formed the basis of the Telegraph’s story three days later: more than 80 per cent of people seeking asylum in the State are believed to be coming across the Border.
Voters who apparently want to believe that the system is rules-based and common sense may have been left scratching their heads. The idea of a leaky Border back door – or of a system that is not fast enough or efficient in dealing with failed applications – is anathema to the prevailing political winds on immigration.
McEntee had given an otherwise confident defence of Ireland’s decision to opt in to the EU’s migration and asylum pact over three hours before the committee.
But colleagues at Cabinet now see her moving centre stage as the debate on migration spreads beyond accommodation.
“The politics has moved to Justice and away from [Minister for Integration] Roderic [O’Gorman],” says one Minister, with McEntee now facing the prospect of being the political fulcrum.
With 100,000 refugees and asylum seekers now in State-provided housing, there is a new emphasis on the Border – how people move into the country, and what happens afterwards.
It comes against a backdrop of simmering tensions on migration that boil over with increasing frequency. Pressure on the migration is now unprecedented.
The belief that a huge percentage of people are coming across the Border has been discussed in senior Government circles for some weeks now
The 80 per cent figure is not a hard data point. After McEntee’s assertion, even officials on the British side were grasping around trying to figure out what it was based on.
Asked for comment, the British embassy issued a fairly terse one-line statement, saying there remained a high level of co-operation on migration, asylum and border security between the UK and Ireland.
The figure is in fact an extrapolation from the percentage of people who claim asylum at the International Protection office on Mount Street, Dublin, which has shot up in recent months, rather than at a port of entry. It is a sort of proxy measurement, based on the strong view among officials in the Department of Justice that the overwhelming majority claiming asylum in Mount Street can only be coming across the Border.
Department of Justice figures suggest 5,161 applications had been made to the end of March, meaning more than 4,100 were made at Mount Street, with the overwhelming majority supposedly coming from Northern Ireland. Given the Border is open, one official said: “We will never have accurate numbers.”
The belief that a huge percentage of people are coming across the Border has been discussed in senior Government circles for some weeks now. However, getting a firm answer on what is driving it is difficult.
A Government source working in the area says the assumption is that many who are presenting – many of whom are Nigerians – had some sort of status in Britain, whether a visa or asylum.
The prospect of the UK’s Rwanda policy – where asylum seekers are flown to the east African country while being processed – coming into effect is another.
A third source says officials have speculated that changes to family reunification rules in the UK for lower-skilled migrant workers could be encouraging family members to come here and travel back to Britain.
Another suggestion is simply that with asylum seekers travelling to the UK in huge numbers, a small percentage of that is going to trickle across to Ireland.
Others believe that word-of-mouth effects spread quickly and there may be some theory about Ireland or its system behind the rise, or that bad actors – people smugglers and organised crime gangs – may be engineering passage to Ireland across the Border.
The truth is probably that all of the above, and other factors, form a potent cocktail.
Security sources say – in a view mirrored in political circles – that part of the reason is the effectiveness of Garda operations overseas, checking documents at embarkation at key airports. The feeling is this has forced people away from airports and airlines to an extent, but given the scale of migratory pressures, that flow is merely dispersed elsewhere. This presents a different problem.
Gardaí can inspect trains and buses, but the length of the Border and sheer number of crossing points – an argument emphasised by the Irish side during clashes over Brexit – stack the odds against them.
“The airport piece is actually easier than the North-South piece,” says one security source.
[ Visa-free travel from South Africa may end under immigration planOpens in new window ]
Similarly, as pressure begins to mount over the number of people the state actually deports, the gardaí will point to the challenge of actually locating people who have been in the State for many years if, as some expect, the political system begins to demand more action on this front.
The hard political truth, however, is that the Coalition must now be seen to be doing something about it.
“We have a serious systems failure around processing times and upholding the rules as we have them,” says a Cabinet source, criticising the Department of Justice for being “completely hands off”, failing to develop capacity or structures over years and appearing “overwhelmed, ineffective and inefficient”.
Since the elevation of Harris as Taoiseach, Government rhetoric on immigration has shifted away from the perennial problem of accommodation, and towards firmer measures that might reduce the flow into the State – in keeping with an emphasis Harris had when he was in the Department of Justice.
The Taoiseach said as much on Thursday, emphasising that the accommodation situation “is an outworking of our migration policy”. This chimes with the “back to basics” and “common sense” threads to Harris’s nascent premiership.
Consistent with his style, there has been a steady drumbeat of policy announcements or flagged interventions. These include further countries being added to the “safe country” list for accelerated processing; new legislation to “fix” the current situation where people coming from the UK cannot be immediately returned due to an Irish High Court ruling that the UK cannot be designated a safe third country; the inclusion of countries (Nigeria, in the first instance) with high numbers of asylum seekers for faster processing alongside safe country applicants; a mooted suspension of visa-free travel from South Africa – something that is said to have been on Harris’s to-do list in Justice but that languished since.
Sources in Government Buildings say to expect more announcements in the coming weeks, a focus on trying new things, on pace and on new deterrent measures.
And yet, for all the urgency and dizzying ambition, room for manoeuvre is limited.
Overhauling something as complex as immigration policy is difficult to do quickly, and Harris has 11 months at most until the next general election.
The migratory trends seem tidal, and continues despite changes on the ground. Fewer single men and more families are coming since the State ran out of capacity to house all who arrive, but the overall number is shooting up.
Similarly, the department has made significant strides in improving decision times on applications and appeals – something seen as key to suppressing numbers arriving from certain jurisdictions – but overall the trend line still reaches skyward.
McEntee indicated last week that returns to the UK could resume after a relatively quick legislative fix – but if the Rwanda policy comes into full effect, would the Irish courts stand over sending people back? Could the Government?
The relentless pace of the migration story shows no signs of yielding. Quite the opposite.
On Thursday night, gardaí clashed with protesters in Harris’s Wicklow constituency. Next week the Oireachtas justice committee will embark on expanded hearings into the migration pact. With Dáil and Seanad motions on the opt-in shifted back a week, the Rural Independents have put down a motion objecting to the pact, heralding more news cycles and scrutiny, which the Government, in its defence, says it welcomes.
On Monday, McEntee will meet her British counterpart James Cleverly, with Harris promising closer co-operation between the Garda and the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the two governments. Against the backdrop of a rapidly shifting challenge – and McEntee’s comments – they will have much to discuss.
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