The first rule of politics: don’t raise expectations that you can do impossible things. The most impossible thing on this island is controlling the Border. We know this from the Troubles. We know it from Brexit. And yet, according to a poll published last weekend in the Sunday Independent, 50 per cent of respondents think “there should be checkpoints at the border with Northern Ireland in Ireland (sic) to limit the number of asylum seekers coming here from the UK”.
Amusingly, more supporters of Sinn Féin than of the Government parties believe this. A hard Border is now, apparently, a patriotic cause.
Oh, how we laughed at the Brits when they were spouting this kind of nonsense! Have we already forgotten “alternative arrangements”, the fantasy spun by the Brexiteers, including Boris Johnson as prime minister, that the flow of goods and people across the Border could somehow be managed without physical barriers?
Some wonderful technology that did not yet exist was going to make it possible to track all movement without border posts or officials on the ground doing checks. To which we replied: don’t be so stupid.
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The Brexiteers had, at least, the excuses of ignorance and indifference. Johnson and his crew knew nothing about the realities of the Border and cared less. It was the Irish greenfly in the perfumed ointment of Brexit – they would say anything, concoct any fiction, spout any old guff that seemed to promise an alternative to either the infamous backstop or the dreaded border in the Irish Sea.
But what’s our excuse? If anyone on the island did not already know about the peculiar complexities of the 500km-long Border, those years between 2016 and 2020 were a crash course in its realities. We learned that in 2016 there were 110 million crossings of the Border. The 15 main official crossing points alone were traversed by 43 million private vehicles, 900,000 cross-border coach passenger journeys and 868,500 cross-border train passengers.
We also learned from a joint exercise that the officials on both sides called a “nightmare” that the Border has 208 known crossing-points – the entire eastern flank of the European Union has 137. The Border bisects 11 roads (including the main Dublin/Belfast motorway where at one point the traffic on one side is in the South and on the other in the North), three bridges and two ferry crossings.
How many gardaí does it take to check the 110 million occupants of cars, trains, coaches and ferries? Much has been made of the fact that the Dundalk-based Immigration Border Control Unit, which was set up in 2004 to conduct such checks, has dwindled from 12 members to just two. But are a dozen searchers any more likely to find a slim needle in a giant haystack than a pair?
The Government has allowed itself, and Ireland, to become a bit part player in a toxic Tory story
This stuff is purely for show. It’s gestural, a vague wave in the general direction of “control”. If we were serious about patrolling a network of roads, waterways and byways more complex than the entire eastern flank of the EU, we’d need to throw the entire Garda force, the Army, the Civil Defence, the Legion of Mary and the Knights of St Columbanus at it. And, as we know from the Troubles when there were thousands of troops on both sides of the Border, it would still be porous.
So how did we get into this morass of magical thinking? The answer lies not so much in the overflow of people coming from Britain as in the overflow of a narrative. The Government has allowed itself, and Ireland, to become a bit part player in a toxic Tory story.
The title of that story is The Small Boats, a phrase that used to be part of one of Britain’s favourite myths of heroic failure, the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. It has been turned, in the mad psychodrama of Brexit, into a threat of invasion that functions as the last hope of a dying Tory regime.
But it is a terror summoned by the Tories themselves. How many asylum seekers crossed the English Channel in small boats before Brexit? None. According to analysis by Prof Thom Brooks of Durham University, “There are no records of any individuals travelling by small boat to claim asylum in 2017 or before.” Brooks characterised the problem as “a consequence of Brexit” and specifically of the UK’s “failure to retain or create anew a returns agreement with the EU after 31 January 2020″.
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Ireland is now caught up in this self-generated horror story. We were collateral damage in the tragicomedy of Brexit and now we’re a subplot in the black farce of its unravelling. We must refuse to play our part in this hysterical charade.
The Tories and their tame media have concocted a fantasy that sending a relatively tiny number of asylum seekers to Rwanda will stop the small boats. We are in danger of inhaling a similarly noxious form of make-believe in which the Border is our English Channel and the Translink bus is the small boat.
Responsible governments don’t pretend to be able to control what they cannot – they plan. Minister for Justice Helen McEntee was warned by her officials in 2022 of what was coming. Nothing was done to prepare for the predicted influx of asylum seekers across the Border. As of April 28th, the Government had made no contact with Northern Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill on this issue. There is no evidence that the Government thought seriously about practical responses to an obvious problem.
This is how to feed the far right and create a sense of public panic. Set up an expectation (policing of the Border) that you cannot possibly fulfil so that everyone can become more and more alarmed as you fail. Create a highly visible and shamefully chaotic image of that failure: young men camping out on the city streets with nowhere to go. Generate a feeling that everything is out of control. Giving these gifts to the “Ireland is full” mob borders on the insane.