Thousands of Irish travellers will be scanned by live facial recognition technology this week as part of UK immigration enforcement efforts at Holyhead port.
Live facial recognition allows authorities to scan faces and compare them against databases in real time to identify offenders or other people of interest.
The use of the controversial technology at the Welsh port comes as police forces in England and Wales prepare a major expansion of the technology.
The trial at Holyhead this week follows a previous pilot by UK authorities in November last year. Transparency data published by the UK home office showed that during six days of trials, more than 7,500 faces were scanned, resulting in one arrest.
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An Garda Síochána will soon be granted powers to use live facial recognition, but the Government has promised it will only be used in emergency situations such as terrorism or missing persons cases.
The UK pilot goes much further and will use the technology to detect immigration offences.
The operation is a “proof-of-concept pilot” by the home office’s immigration enforcement division, which plans to use the technology to locate people within their “population of interest”.
Holyhead was chosen after intelligence showed individuals were returning to the UK in breach of deportation orders and using the Common Travel Area to circumvent immigration controls, internal documents note.
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Most passengers on the route are British or Irish nationals who move freely without routine checks, and could “argue they are placed at a disadvantage by the location of the pilot”, the documents state.
Human rights groups warn that the rapid adoption of facial recognition technology could enable widespread surveillance and discrimination.
Concerns have also been raised about its use on journeys within the Common Travel Area. Dr Elizabeth Farries, of University College Dublin’s Centre for Digital Policy, said there are “established problems” with live facial recognition technology.
“We are being continuously fingerprinted as members of the public going about our daily lives. We are caught in this continuous monitoring, which poses a high risk to our fundamental rights,” Farries told Belfast-based investigative website The Detail.
Úna Boyd, of the UK’s Committee on the Administration of Justice, said the trial “is yet another example of the London government attempting to circumvent the law and carry out checks on Common Travel Area journeys”.
A home office spokeswoman rejected the claims, stating that “it is inaccurate to state Live Facial Recognition is used to circumvent border arrangements.”
The Department of Justice in Dublin said it would not comment on operations in another jurisdiction.
Live facial recognition technology captures digital images as people move through a designated “Zone of Recognition”.
Facial features are then “extracted and expressed as numerical values”, the home office documents state.
At Holyhead, images are compared against a watch list of individuals who have previously been issued deportation orders and are suspected of attempting to return to the UK.
The initial three-day trial in November scanned 2,038 faces, but there were no matches to the watch list.
A second three-day trial later that month scanned a further 5,474 faces, leading to two alerts, one of whom was arrested.
The home office announced a third trial will start “the week commencing 23 February 2026”.
Attempts to grant gardaí such powers since 2022 have met opposition from TDs and civil liberties groups.
Last year, the Irish Government’s expert group on artificial intelligence warned that plans for facial recognition technology risk “gradual mission creep towards an untargeted mass surveillance state”.
Olga Cronin, a senior policy officer at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, warned about the potential future use of powerful surveillance technologies.
“When there are new technologies put on the table, we always have to consider what that looks like in the hands of a non-democratic ruler,” Ms Cronin said.
She cited its use by Immigrant and Customs Enforcement in the US, by Iran against protesters, and by Hungary against LGBT parade participants.
“We might have a benign government today, and they might want to use tools for legitimate reasons,” she added.
“But we always have to be mindful that we are embedding surveillance infrastructure that may be in the hands of not-so-benign governments in the future.”
Luke Butterly is an investigative reporter with Belfast-based The Detail
