Looking at legislation to change the Common Travel Area (CTA) in the House of Lords in London on April 1st 2009, Robin Valerian Dixon – Lord Glentoran – was a worried man.
The Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill proposed by British Labour Party home secretary Jacqui Smith wanted passports to be shown by those entering Britain from the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.
However, the Antrim-born Dixon saw problems ahead for the North. Given the open Irish Border, checks would inevitably end up being made not across the Irish Border, but between Northern Ireland and Britain, he feared.
Even word of the eventually-unsuccessful legislation had changed attitudes, he told peers at the time, describing how British politicians returning to London a few days before through George Best Airport in Belfast had been told to produce passports.
“I have never been asked for a passport going in or out of there in my life but somebody jumped the gun then. It was an example of what might happen,” said the former Olympic bobsleigher.
Dixon appears to have understood what a later generation of unionist politicians do not – that tighter immigration checks between the Republic and Britain will inevitably affect Northern Ireland.
The CTA offers Irish and British citizens the right to travel passport-free – but, more importantly, to live and work freely – in the Republic, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and Channel Islands.
Agreed in 1923, though lacking any single legislative text backing it up, the CTA was an outcome of the departure of the Irish Free State from the United Kingdom after independence.
The year before, the British home office had considered the immigration controls needed after Irish independence, before recoiling in horror at the prospect of checks along the Irish Border.
In return, the newly-established Irish authorities quietly agreed in February 1923 to respect London’s immigration decisions, including keeping out people who were personae non gratae to the British.
“Since the beginning, the Home Office and its Irish equivalents have always shared information. That’s always been part of the arrangement,” says Bernard Ryan, professor of migration law at University of Leicester.
The Jacqui Smith-proposed curbs of 15 years ago failed then, but immigration is more complicated than ever, especially after last month’s Belfast riots started after a man was stabbed in the city.
Following the attack, a slew of unionist politicians – the Democratic Unionist Party’s Gavin Robinson and Jim Allister of Traditional Unionist Voice, but others, too – demanded action.
The “open, porous Border” should be closed, argued Robinson in House of Commons exchanges, while Allister said the CTA had never been designed to “provide freedom of movement for illegal migrants”.
Today, however, there is zero enthusiasm shown in London to heed unionist calls, while co-operation and trust between Dublin and London remains high, even if everyone can see points of weakness.
The CTA has not operated for all of its existence. It was suspended on the outbreak of the second World War, with work permits, travel restrictions and identity checks required for travel across the Irish Sea.
However, the same checks were imposed on ferry travel from Larne, Derry and Belfast in Northern Ireland to British ports and continued until 1952 when the curbs on the Republic fell away.
In an unsuccessful 1948 bid to get the controls removed, Ulster Unionist MP Conolly Hugh Gage said they “caused acute and growing resentment” among “all classes” in Northern Ireland.
Wartime rules were borne with fortitude, he told MPs: “But we are now in the third year of peace, and yet we still have this system which is increasingly obnoxious to us in Ulster.”
Ironically, passport-free travel rights have been long been overtaken by the demands of most airlines, bar British Airways, for passports to be shown before passengers board flights.
Equally, the Irish authorities passed immigration legislation in 1997 that ignored the passport-free rights enshrined in the agreement, since passengers from British airports must show identification but not necessarily passports.
Publicly, the demand on Irish or British travellers is for passports, though some – including the former British Airways and Aer Lingus chief executive Willie Walsh – have long insisted on showing a driving licence, as the law allows.
The British rules, however, are stricter, since no powers exist there to carry out mandatory, or random checks, as former senior UK Border Force official David Wood recalls.
On occasion, UK Border Force immigration officers would “occasionally” be put on duty at Stranraer in Scotland to monitor passengers getting off the Larne ferry, says Wood, who left the Border Force in 2015.
Using powers to check if they had 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”, says Wood.
In the wake of the Belfast attack last month, the focus was on the numbers who came to the Republic and who then crossed the Border to claim asylum in Northern Ireland, or in Great Britain.
The 30-year-old Sudanese man Hadi Alodid now facing charges in Belfast travelled from Sudan to Paris and on to Dublin, before travelling by bus to Belfast in February 2023, without seeking to claim asylum in either France, or the Republic.
However, the Department of Justice insists the vast majority of such traffic is not South to North but rather in the other direction, saying nearly 88 per cent of those who claimed asylum in Dublin last year, or 11,557 people, came via Northern Ireland.
Definitive numbers are not possible, according to the department, because of the lack of routine border checks, but its number, it says, is based on interviews with asylum seekers, or those working in the field.
Privately, British officials have long cast doubt on the Irish numbers. They have always been careful not to pick a public fight with Dublin but they insist significant numbers cross the Border into Northern Ireland.
Information about passengers is shared between the two states, and some issues caused by Brexit have been overcome.
European Union data protection rules upset the data sharing that was taking place after June 2021, bar in exceptional cases, because of concerns in Brussels that UK protections did not match EU standards.
A data adequacy Brussels/London agreement just before Christmas last year restored the ability to share personal data about people until 2031, though subject to a review during its lifetime.
However, it did not grant the UK access to EU’s security and migration databases, notably the Eurodac fingerprint system – a major blow to its ability to curb irregular border crossings.
Remembering his time as minister for justice, former Fianna Fáil TD Dermot Ahern said he was concerned after the 2007 terrorist attacks in London that Ireland could be used as “a backdoor to England”.
He tried to engage then Conservative home secretary and later British prime minister Theresa May to improve controls, especially speeding up co-operation between British police and gardaí.
“It wasn’t just about immigration. Al Qaeda was bombing Britain. I often said to [then taoiseach] Bertie [Ahern], ‘We could be used as a stepping stone by these fellows.’ But I couldn’t make common cause with London,” he said.
In March, Taoiseach Micheál Martin and British prime minister Keir Starmer agreed to share more immigration data, though the details of the arrangement were unclear.
In addition, steps are due to be taken to ensure that the CTA’s rights to work and benefits – all the more complicated to manage because neither state has national ID cards – are not abused.
The challenges to the CTA will become more frequent, not less, says Ryan. Debate should centre on its immigration role, not “this benign agreement about British and Irish citizens having rights in the other”, the academic says.
Immigration will “always” present huge challenges, Ryan adds. “Once you accept that, it’s always going to be messy to come up with arrangements acceptable to the public, and which can work.”
The UK’s EU exit makes matters harder, with mismatching rules and “raised expectations on the UK side, particularly in Northern Ireland, about what sovereignty means. Expectations that are unrealistic.”
Public consent must be won, says Ryan.
“Let’s have an open and honest debate about them, so that we can hopefully get an acceptance of why things are the way they are, and work through it.”
