Garda Special Branch officers, operating the Government's new immigration laws, have boarded Belfast-Dublin trains and asked rail staff if there are "any black people" on board, according to CIE employees.
Gardai board the 6.10 p.m. and 8.10 p.m. trains at Dundalk daily. On daytime services Special Branch officers stand guard at the ticket gate in Connolly Station looking for people they suspect of being illegal immigrants.
No part of the State's justice or immigration apparatus has yet stated what criteria the officers use to identify potential illegal immigrants.
Last Thursday an officer boarded the 8.10 p.m. train and questioned only one passenger, a woman of African origin. She was the only black person on the train.
The officer showed the woman his identification and introduced himself as "immigration" and asked for her identification. She produced two items of identification, which the officer examined. He then left.
The woman later said she had been embarrassed by the incident but did not wish to comment further. She said she lived in Dublin and this had not happened to her before.
According to staff on the train, gardai have been boarding the two evening services at Dundalk for the past three months, since the Government introduced Border controls to stop "aliens" from entering the State.
A CIE employee who asked not to be named said the practice of gardai inquiring if there were black people on board the trains was a cause of concern to some staff. Two of their fellow workers are Indian-Irish and, as friends, other staff found what was happening "very offensive".
He said some gardai boarded the train at the rear and made their way through the carriages. Others asked staff if there were any black people on board and went straight to them.
The CIE employee said he had seen two incidents which had embarrassed him. A black British engineer working for the company which had introduced the new train to the Belfast service had been asked for identification.
And on another occasion two Chinese students had been turned back from Connolly Station because they did not have satisfactory identification. He said the students were from Northern Ireland and were visiting Dublin for a seminar. They had to travel back to Coleraine, Co Derry, where they were attending the University of Ulster.
A Garda spokesman said yesterday that officers were on duty under the Aliens Order introduced by the Government last June. This empowered them to question any person they suspected might be trying to enter the State without proper documentation.
Asked how illegal aliens were identified, he said: "We as gardai can make inquiries of any individual about any matter, but they are not necessarily obliged to answer." If anyone had a complaint, they had a right to make a statement to the Garda Complaints Board.
A spokesman for the Department of Justice said: "There is no policy in place that persons of a certain ethnic origin or colour are targeted in terms of the application of this particular law. There is no policy of that nature in place.
"The reality is that 800 people have been refused entry, and in that group there are people of all nationalities, central and eastern European, Australian, Ukrainian and Belarussian."