May 1, 2024 - 11:50am

For those who have been following the twists and turns of the national debate on the Rwanda scheme, the unfolding row with Ireland presents an embarrassment of riches.

Remember when parliamentary legislation to deem Rwanda a safe country was an assault on the rule of law? Well, Dublin is now doing the same thing — passing a law to declare the United Kingdom safe in order to get past a High Court ruling.

Then there’s the question of how those sceptical of the scheme’s potential as a deterrent explain Ireland’s claim that the Rwanda policy has driven a surge of people crossing from Northern Ireland to claim asylum in the Republic.

But for those with longer memories — a necessity in Irish affairs — perhaps the most galling development is yet another reminder that, despite the line sold to British negotiators during Brexit, Dublin can and will police the land border when it chooses to.

Sky News’s Darren McCaffrey reports that 100 Gardaí (police) officers are being deployed “to prevent people abusing the Common Travel Area between Ireland and the UK as a means to enter Ireland to claim asylum”.

Now the Irish Government insists that this force is not going to be deployed at the actual border itself. “The protection of an open border on the island of Ireland was and remains a key priority to the communities on both sides of the border,” according to a Garda spokesman.

Fair enough, one might think. But remember: time and again, as Britain negotiated its departure from the European Union, Unionists floated proposals for just such a light-touch approach to enforcing a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

And time and again, they were dismissed. When their critics were not trying to claim that any border whatsoever would breach the Belfast Agreement (it wouldn’t), they insisted that such proposals were unworkable.

Yet suddenly not only is enforcing a legal, if not physical, border on the island of Ireland fine, but the Irish Government professes to believe it will work — and this time in dealing not with registered importers and exporters, but illegal migrants and refugees.

In truth, the maximalist position pursued by Dublin and Brussels during the negotiations was always cant. Ireland can and has enforced the border when it suits, as happened during the foot-and-mouth epidemic. Its entire position during Brexit was that a hard border was utterly unacceptable — and that it would impose one if Northern Ireland wasn’t forced into ongoing alignment.

Unfortunately Theresa May, like other mainland politicians before her, memed herself into a terrible policy, allowing her line about “no return to the borders of the past” (a reference to a security border created to try and combat a sustained campaign of ethnic cleansing by the IRA) to mutate into a policy of no border at all.

Her opponents were astonished. Tom McTague reported one Dublin figure as saying: “We just could not believe the British had accepted the text.” The simple fact is that if a totally invisible border were a stipulation of the Belfast Agreement (which it isn’t) then it would bind both parties, not just the UK. There would be reciprocal restraints on Ireland’s freedom of policy action to prevent it diverging.

These latest developments are just another reminder that no such restraints exist, and that we owe the Sea border to a generation of politicians whose experience of Northern Ireland amounts, at best, to flying over for a day and voicing the right pieties.


Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

HCH_Hill