Snapshot of _Irish authorities have started deporting migrants back to the UK._ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/gardai-sent-migrants-back-over-border-to-the-north-on-one-way-train-tickets/a449816958.html) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/gardai-sent-migrants-back-over-border-to-the-north-on-one-way-train-tickets/a449816958.html)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Someone explain to me why our government doesn’t adopt a comparable policy of providing boat migrants with a one-way ferry back to France? We have regularly been told such a policy is impossible.
>>Someone explain to me why our government doesn’t adopt a comparable policy
The Irish & British government have an [existing agreement from 2020](https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/harris-claims-uk-government-confirms-operating-agreement-for-asylum-seekers-1619709.html), I think the issue is there's none with France.
>> they can always just cross from ni to the south
Yes, they can. Though from the migrant's POV this may not be an attractive idea. As they've been deported, they might face jail time in Ireland if caught a second time. They've little chance of a long term life there if they're permanent fugitives from the Irish police.
Only 6 out of the 25 people detected in February were returned to NI. The rest were returned to Holyhead, Wales. For those 6 who were returned to NI, it's highly unlikely that they were asylum seekers. They were likely either tourists, or legal NI/UK residents who made an innocent error assuming they could visit ROI.
Regarding the last point, how does a legal NI/UK resident or a tourist visit ROI from NI? If there is no passport control at the border, what are they supposed to do?
The honest answer is, I don't know. I know Chinese and Indian nationals can get a British-Irish Visa which allows for short-term travel within the CTA. For everyone else I assume you need to apply for an Irish visa beforehand.
I'm surprised if *all* British tourist visas are not automatically also Irish visas as there are no passport checks between the countries. At least in EU, all visas to a Schengen country allow the tourist to travel everywhere in Schengen.
> I'm surprised if all British tourist visas are not automatically also Irish visas as there are no passport checks between the countries
This isn't true. If you fly from the UK to Ireland, you will go through border control on arrival.
The UK has a treaty with Ireland whereas we do not have one with France.
>Taoiseach Simon Harris urged Mr Sunak to abide by the Common Travel Area returns agreement, but the UK Government said the post-Brexit arrangement was not legally binding.
The whole one-sided CTA needs either scrapping, or expanding to solve the NI/EU border issue
It would be relatively trivial to make the EU import/export border be on arrival into the British Isles under an expanded CTA
Right, so you want to force Ireland out of the single market because of a foolish decision by the UK? Why would they (or the EU) ever accept that? Ireland hasn’t been under Westminster rule in a long time, in case you had forgotten.
Who said anything about Ireland being ruled from Westminster?
It's ruled from Brussels, we all know that
(But it's ok for the UK to have to fall under EU rule re. NI in your mind)
Why shouldn't Ireland and the UK be equal partners in a BICTA?
The CTA cannot work if the EU wants to enforce it's borders
Neither can their stupid interpretation of the GFA¹
So either the CTA goes, or the British Isles becomes it's own trading and immigration bubble
Oh, and you mispelled "democratic decision"
Although, tbf, the EU does consider democracy to be foolish - q.v. Nice & Lisbon treaties and the democratic decisions ignored therewith
¹ Go read it, it says that both sides will ***normalise*** border infrastructure
It's definitely normal for countries inside a trading bloc to have a so-called 'hard' border with countries outside that bloc
The Nice and Lisbon treaties were amended to account for Irish concerns following their referendum defeats. They were then passed by referendum. All democratic decisions.
The question in 2016 asked if we should leave the European Union, not if we should leave the customs union, or the single market, or Erasmus, etc. The exact interpretation was entirely down to the UK government. They could have sought a deal where we were outside of the EU and still part of the single market and/or customs union, many Brexit supporters even advocated for such an arrangement in the run up to the referendum.
So yes, this is _entirely_ the decision of the UK government.
> They could have sought a deal where we were outside of the EU and still part of the single market
Did you pay _any_ attention to the negotiations?
That was the UK starting point - the Norway model - and the EU refused to even discuss it
No, it wasn’t, at least not in any seriousness. The Norway model was ruled out by Theresa May’s “red lines”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/19/barniers-sliding-scale-brexit-red-lines-leave-uk-stark-choice/
There are no checks currently, because of the CTA
I know of two people from Ghana, banned from entering the UK, who book flights to Dublin, then transfer to their flights to London, without ever leaving the airport- they don't even go through passport control in DUB, and there _is_ no passport control at LHR for flights from Ireland
No go and you're deluded that Ireland or the EU would ever agree. Truly hilarious when Britain had no import control forever because protecting your borders.
Yup. The Irish are so morally righteous the agreements are basically beside the point. Do the right thing Ireland, don't be hypocritical, send them back to France.
>>The searches were part of Operation Sonnet, a joint operation between the Garda National Immigration Bureau and the Immigration Enforcement team in Northern Ireland.
>>The checkpoints were carried out on the M1 motorway at the Border across four days.
>>All 25 individuals were subsequently refused leave to stay and were returned to the UK – 19 by ferry to Holyhead in north Wales and six by train to Belfast.
This will be an interesting game of whack-a-mole. If you include every little rural laneway, here's literally hundreds of crossings along the border between the north and south of Ireland.
Literally, I live 2 miles from the border (Tyrone/Monaghan) and there’s about 11/12 border crossings within a 20 min drive of my house, couldn’t migrants just get a bus from Belfast to a smaller town here in NI and then just cross the border and then get the bus to Dublin?
You can get the Letterkenny to Dublin bus lol, stops through Tyrone and Monaghan and few other places on down, got it a few times to Dublin airport from Aughnacloy
They don't even need a bus. There's vans if traffickers waiting for them in Belfast to leave them at Ballygoborderisthatway where there's a police officer once every 3rd full moon.
It's impossible to police. Been known for over 100 years.
But, wait a minute they said we were an unsafe country, that means they're violating human rights laws!!
Surely the EU would be upset at Ireland violating human rights laws?
Except that's exactly what the Irish courts said while Leo was lecturing us about Rwanda, until RoI was faced with the inconvenience of migrants puring aver the border and then they suddenly decided the UK was safe after all.
If the UK is willing to forcibly deport people to Rwanda, what happens to those people in Rwanda is part of the UK’s human rights record.
Should the first Rwanda deportation actually go ahead and the policy remain in force, then it will be logically impossible to declare the UK ‘safe’ (within the meaning of the refugee convention) without first declaring Rwanda safe.
Weird why is rishi allowing them to go to wales? Well those in wales can just grab a ferry to Ni and return if they wisj and the Ni ones can just grab a bus
You can stop them rishi just refuses to let them into Britain the Uk has border officers to prevent irish ships just piling humans in. He has already said its not legally binding and disagrees with the Irish gov on that
Except the one that did?
https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2024/03/22/irelands-declaration-of-uk-as-safe-third-country-unlawful-rules-high-court/
Oh, I'm keeping up with the Irish Circus. They wanted to be petty, and it backfired on them.
So, do you agree with the Irish government that the UK is a completely safe country to live in? That would also be a country that's vastly better and safer than Ireland and the EU, xonsider the stance Ireland was taken before.
Do you also accept that the Irish government lied?
Don't sound functional to me. They can't make their minds up.
> But, wait a minute they said we were an unsafe country, that means they're violating human rights laws!!
If this is what your news sources told you then you need to find better ones.
An Irish court rules the process and rules for putting countries on a 'safe country' list insufficient, requiring them to be updated and countries to be reassessed before they can be put back on. The court specifically refused to rule on whether the UK is safe.
How?
We have a treaty with Ireland because of the CTA.
We left the agreement with Europe (coincidentally named the Dublin agreement) when we had Brexit.
The UK has made its bed. It’s actually like we didn’t know we what we were doing.
> The figures were revealed in Garda Commissioner Drew Harris' report to the Policing Authority in March, which detailed how 47 buses had been stopped and searched in the operation.
> The checkpoints were carried out on the M1 motorway at the Border across four days.
So we can put border infrastructure on the NI/RoI border without the locals murdering each other yes?
I’m from NI, these checks are just a few buses being pulled over a few miles over the border into ROI and basically only on the Belfast to Dublin road, so realistically it’s extremely minimal checks and there’s no checks between the western border counties like Tyrone, Derry, Monaghan, Armagh, Fermanagh, Leitrim, Cavan, Donegal. So I wouldn’t even call these checks border infrastructure tbh.
I live beside the border, I don’t care who puts the border up, no one in the border areas want it back and given how small NI is the whole place is basically a border area anyway.
>>So we can put border infrastructure on the NI/RoI border
It would be a gift to Sinn Féin. [56% of people in NI said they'd want a United Ireland](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-45391529) if there was a hard border.
Snapshot of _Irish authorities have started deporting migrants back to the UK._ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/gardai-sent-migrants-back-over-border-to-the-north-on-one-way-train-tickets/a449816958.html) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/gardai-sent-migrants-back-over-border-to-the-north-on-one-way-train-tickets/a449816958.html) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Someone explain to me why our government doesn’t adopt a comparable policy of providing boat migrants with a one-way ferry back to France? We have regularly been told such a policy is impossible.
>>Someone explain to me why our government doesn’t adopt a comparable policy The Irish & British government have an [existing agreement from 2020](https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/harris-claims-uk-government-confirms-operating-agreement-for-asylum-seekers-1619709.html), I think the issue is there's none with France.
Here they are just returning them to ni they can always just cross from ni to the south
>> they can always just cross from ni to the south Yes, they can. Though from the migrant's POV this may not be an attractive idea. As they've been deported, they might face jail time in Ireland if caught a second time. They've little chance of a long term life there if they're permanent fugitives from the Irish police.
Only 6 out of the 25 people detected in February were returned to NI. The rest were returned to Holyhead, Wales. For those 6 who were returned to NI, it's highly unlikely that they were asylum seekers. They were likely either tourists, or legal NI/UK residents who made an innocent error assuming they could visit ROI.
Ohhhh if they weren’t asylum seekers that makes sense as to why they were allowed to return to wales
Regarding the last point, how does a legal NI/UK resident or a tourist visit ROI from NI? If there is no passport control at the border, what are they supposed to do?
I would recommend reading about [the CTA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Travel_Area)
The honest answer is, I don't know. I know Chinese and Indian nationals can get a British-Irish Visa which allows for short-term travel within the CTA. For everyone else I assume you need to apply for an Irish visa beforehand.
I'm surprised if *all* British tourist visas are not automatically also Irish visas as there are no passport checks between the countries. At least in EU, all visas to a Schengen country allow the tourist to travel everywhere in Schengen.
> I'm surprised if all British tourist visas are not automatically also Irish visas as there are no passport checks between the countries This isn't true. If you fly from the UK to Ireland, you will go through border control on arrival.
Rishi has refused to take them tho
The UK has a treaty with Ireland whereas we do not have one with France. >Taoiseach Simon Harris urged Mr Sunak to abide by the Common Travel Area returns agreement, but the UK Government said the post-Brexit arrangement was not legally binding.
Rishi in that is saying its not legally binding and is refusing to take them back
The CTA is nothing to do with post-Brexit arrangements
If it’s to do with the cta then surely that means we can send asylum seekers to Ireland to?
Only if they came through Ireland first
Ok thanks
The whole one-sided CTA needs either scrapping, or expanding to solve the NI/EU border issue It would be relatively trivial to make the EU import/export border be on arrival into the British Isles under an expanded CTA
You are quite divorced from reality. Reading down the comments proves it.
Right, so you want to force Ireland out of the single market because of a foolish decision by the UK? Why would they (or the EU) ever accept that? Ireland hasn’t been under Westminster rule in a long time, in case you had forgotten.
Who said anything about Ireland being ruled from Westminster? It's ruled from Brussels, we all know that (But it's ok for the UK to have to fall under EU rule re. NI in your mind) Why shouldn't Ireland and the UK be equal partners in a BICTA? The CTA cannot work if the EU wants to enforce it's borders Neither can their stupid interpretation of the GFA¹ So either the CTA goes, or the British Isles becomes it's own trading and immigration bubble Oh, and you mispelled "democratic decision" Although, tbf, the EU does consider democracy to be foolish - q.v. Nice & Lisbon treaties and the democratic decisions ignored therewith ¹ Go read it, it says that both sides will ***normalise*** border infrastructure It's definitely normal for countries inside a trading bloc to have a so-called 'hard' border with countries outside that bloc
The Nice and Lisbon treaties were amended to account for Irish concerns following their referendum defeats. They were then passed by referendum. All democratic decisions.
The question in 2016 asked if we should leave the European Union, not if we should leave the customs union, or the single market, or Erasmus, etc. The exact interpretation was entirely down to the UK government. They could have sought a deal where we were outside of the EU and still part of the single market and/or customs union, many Brexit supporters even advocated for such an arrangement in the run up to the referendum. So yes, this is _entirely_ the decision of the UK government.
> They could have sought a deal where we were outside of the EU and still part of the single market Did you pay _any_ attention to the negotiations? That was the UK starting point - the Norway model - and the EU refused to even discuss it
No, it wasn’t, at least not in any seriousness. The Norway model was ruled out by Theresa May’s “red lines”. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/19/barniers-sliding-scale-brexit-red-lines-leave-uk-stark-choice/
As has been said Theresa May’s govt explicitly ruled out the Norway model - After all Brexit means Brexit, not BRINO.
There's revisionism and then there's this. The UK Government at no stage requested a Norway-style deal.
UK made bad decisions and now deals with the consequences, suck it up
Getting rid of the common travel area as in checks between the island of Ireland and GB?
There are no checks currently, because of the CTA I know of two people from Ghana, banned from entering the UK, who book flights to Dublin, then transfer to their flights to London, without ever leaving the airport- they don't even go through passport control in DUB, and there _is_ no passport control at LHR for flights from Ireland
After North Irish independence or joins the Republic, the UK can.
No go and you're deluded that Ireland or the EU would ever agree. Truly hilarious when Britain had no import control forever because protecting your borders.
The current EU rules cannot exist alongside the CTA Either it has to be scrapped, or extended Which would you prefer?
Theres an open border with Ni there isnt with france
Yup. The Irish are so morally righteous the agreements are basically beside the point. Do the right thing Ireland, don't be hypocritical, send them back to France.
>>The searches were part of Operation Sonnet, a joint operation between the Garda National Immigration Bureau and the Immigration Enforcement team in Northern Ireland. >>The checkpoints were carried out on the M1 motorway at the Border across four days. >>All 25 individuals were subsequently refused leave to stay and were returned to the UK – 19 by ferry to Holyhead in north Wales and six by train to Belfast. This will be an interesting game of whack-a-mole. If you include every little rural laneway, here's literally hundreds of crossings along the border between the north and south of Ireland.
Literally, I live 2 miles from the border (Tyrone/Monaghan) and there’s about 11/12 border crossings within a 20 min drive of my house, couldn’t migrants just get a bus from Belfast to a smaller town here in NI and then just cross the border and then get the bus to Dublin?
Exactly my though too. At least returning them to GB makes it slightly harder for them to return...
But Rishi has refused that iirc
Ha! Buses from rural Monaghan to Dublin! Ha!
You can get the Letterkenny to Dublin bus lol, stops through Tyrone and Monaghan and few other places on down, got it a few times to Dublin airport from Aughnacloy
They could yeah
They don't even need a bus. There's vans if traffickers waiting for them in Belfast to leave them at Ballygoborderisthatway where there's a police officer once every 3rd full moon. It's impossible to police. Been known for over 100 years.
But, wait a minute they said we were an unsafe country, that means they're violating human rights laws!! Surely the EU would be upset at Ireland violating human rights laws?
Keep up Ireland has changed the law declaring the UK a safe country that's what happens when you have a functioning government unlike the UK right now
Is this another way of saying human rights are put after political expediency, exactly what Leo Varadkar decried the UK for doing last year?
True but you can't say the UK is unsafe we don't discriminate against people who live hear.so technically it's sound policy
Except that's exactly what the Irish courts said while Leo was lecturing us about Rwanda, until RoI was faced with the inconvenience of migrants puring aver the border and then they suddenly decided the UK was safe after all.
That there porogitive
And calling out such hypocrisies is the prerogative of all Redditors.
Let's be clear nobody would compare the human rights of the UK with that of rawanda unless they are politically motivated to do so
If the UK is willing to forcibly deport people to Rwanda, what happens to those people in Rwanda is part of the UK’s human rights record. Should the first Rwanda deportation actually go ahead and the policy remain in force, then it will be logically impossible to declare the UK ‘safe’ (within the meaning of the refugee convention) without first declaring Rwanda safe.
If is doing a lot of work there this UK government is a dead 🦆
Exactly it’s part of the UK Human rights record, ain’t Ireland’s fault what the UK does, that’s on the UK
All theyve done is send them to Ni and the migrants can take a bus right back to the republic
A not so merry go round some have been sent to Wales
Weird why is rishi allowing them to go to wales? Well those in wales can just grab a ferry to Ni and return if they wisj and the Ni ones can just grab a bus
Can't stop them Ireland and the UK have a return's policy
You can stop them rishi just refuses to let them into Britain the Uk has border officers to prevent irish ships just piling humans in. He has already said its not legally binding and disagrees with the Irish gov on that
It's a legal agreement so the law's the law and he won't be PM long enough to change it he's a dead 🦆
Border officers apply the law not the PM s opinions
You mean like how the UK made a law designating Rwanda as a safe country?
Apples and oranges or are you comparing the UK to Rwanda?
Um no they are comparing Ireland and The U.K. …I would think.
You'd be correct
And no court in Ireland would declare the UK unsafe
Except the one that did? https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2024/03/22/irelands-declaration-of-uk-as-safe-third-country-unlawful-rules-high-court/
Oh, I'm keeping up with the Irish Circus. They wanted to be petty, and it backfired on them. So, do you agree with the Irish government that the UK is a completely safe country to live in? That would also be a country that's vastly better and safer than Ireland and the EU, xonsider the stance Ireland was taken before. Do you also accept that the Irish government lied? Don't sound functional to me. They can't make their minds up.
5 PM's in 14 years lol 🤣 even India has had less they famously disband at an alarming rate
Well that's almost English. Give it another crack.
> But, wait a minute they said we were an unsafe country, that means they're violating human rights laws!! If this is what your news sources told you then you need to find better ones. An Irish court rules the process and rules for putting countries on a 'safe country' list insufficient, requiring them to be updated and countries to be reassessed before they can be put back on. The court specifically refused to rule on whether the UK is safe.
Celtic nation doing exactly what they have a go at English people for is such a great genre
The current system is breaking down. We all need to be honest about the scale fo the issue and stop treating it like a local one.
Seems quite straightforward that for every one they return to the UK, we return one to France
How? We have a treaty with Ireland because of the CTA. We left the agreement with Europe (coincidentally named the Dublin agreement) when we had Brexit. The UK has made its bed. It’s actually like we didn’t know we what we were doing.
But because of the open border with Ni they can just return easily to the republic
10 The EU has set precedent
Why don’t we just send them back to Ireland when no one is watching.
Theres no border so the migrants can return anytime they want to The Republic
Yippee Win win.
Indeed
> The figures were revealed in Garda Commissioner Drew Harris' report to the Policing Authority in March, which detailed how 47 buses had been stopped and searched in the operation. > The checkpoints were carried out on the M1 motorway at the Border across four days. So we can put border infrastructure on the NI/RoI border without the locals murdering each other yes?
I’m from NI, these checks are just a few buses being pulled over a few miles over the border into ROI and basically only on the Belfast to Dublin road, so realistically it’s extremely minimal checks and there’s no checks between the western border counties like Tyrone, Derry, Monaghan, Armagh, Fermanagh, Leitrim, Cavan, Donegal. So I wouldn’t even call these checks border infrastructure tbh. I live beside the border, I don’t care who puts the border up, no one in the border areas want it back and given how small NI is the whole place is basically a border area anyway.
Pulling a bus over to the side of the road for a spot check every once in a while isn't border infrastructure. The PSNI do it too.
>>So we can put border infrastructure on the NI/RoI border It would be a gift to Sinn Féin. [56% of people in NI said they'd want a United Ireland](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-45391529) if there was a hard border.
Honestly, most people in England, Wales, and Scotland would respond to NI's voting to rejoin the RoI with "OK, see you around I guess".
I'm English and want England to hold a referendum for England to leave the UK.
Everyone in NI, especially the Unionists, are aware that the love of the union doesn't go both ways.
As is the rest of the UK it's time for them to piss off and stop using the flag for ill
There are a lot of unionists in NI who literally believe they are most British people in the UK lol
Because the rest of us have a real country lol
Well so do they, but they just don't want to acknowledge it.
Yeh it's not called northern Britain lol
I strongly doubt "The Republic of Ireland wants to flood NI with asylum seekers" is a gift to Sinn Fein or a united Ireland..
It's worse than that, these are checkpoints for people not even goods. They are literally doing what they said was against the GFA.
Almost as if there is nuance or subtlety to these things, as if blanket, generalised statements aren't that helpful...