The British home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood of 15 years, a barrister, a former secretary of state for justice and former lord chancellor. Her family background is Kashmiri Muslim, and her parents were migrants to the UK. She is regarded as being on the more conservative wing of the current Labour Party.
She is spearheading a policy change to tighten up Britain’s laws on asylum seeking. She is partly inspired by the example of Denmark, which has opted to remain out of the EU’s jurisdiction in relation to asylum seeking. Denmark has instead retained its own capacity to decide how and to what extent it will deal with asylum seekers and migration under the flag of asylum seeking.
She described the problem of illegal migration to the UK as “tearing the country apart”. In terms of British politics, her stance on asylum seeking is unusual. The Tories and the Reform party are somewhat outmanoeuvred by the change in the tone of Keir Starmer’s government on the issue. The Tories, in particular, are rather brass-necked, having failed abysmally to deal with migration issues themselves.
Apart from those granted visas to migrate to the UK or to enter the UK legally as students and tourists each year, the unlawful small-boat channel crossings have brought more than 36,000 migrants to the UK this year already. The first six months of 2025 showed a 48 per cent increase on the corresponding period in 2024. The highest annual figure for small-boat crossings was 2022, when the Tories were in office. In that year, there were more than 45,000 arrivals. And all came via safe third countries.
The UK has faced challenges very similar to those besetting Ireland in relation to asylum seeking. Providing physical shelter in hotels and other places has proven difficult, both in terms of logistics and politics. The budgetary situation confronting UK chancellor Rachel Reeves is bleak enough, without diverting resources to attempt to deal with those entering the UK illegally. Cutbacks in expenditure and tax rises are difficult at the best of times.
But budgetary retrenchment that leaves average voters worse off by raising taxes and starving social service providers of resources – while doing little or nothing to contain illegal migration – plays straight into the hands of Reform supporters and of amnesiac Tory supporters, while dismaying Labour’s political base. All this bodes well for Nigel Farage’s prospects and creates alarm on overcrowded Labour backbenches. A period of electoral typhoons is in prospect in Britain.
From Ireland’s perspective, this is deeply problematic. Close to 90 per cent of asylum seekers here travel via the UK, a safe country. Our Government is proposing to introduce legislation to implement the EU migration pact. But the response of various NGOs to the Government’s draft legislation only underlines the impending difficulties the proposals are supposed to confront.
The Department of Justice has told the Oireachtas committee on Justice that detaining asylum seekers in centres is only a possible “last resort” response. That admission is at least honest to some extent. But I doubt that there will be any such centres in practice. Likewise, it is doubtful that asylum claims will be dealt with within the three-month period envisaged by the pact.
Even if Irish processing is speeded up, lengthy applications for judicial review by the High Court and the follow-on delays caused by appeals of High Court decisions will mean that, in practice, no one will be going home on a deportation flight within a year of arriving in Ireland and applying for international protection. I cannot see the Irish judiciary approving a strict or effective implementation of the migration pact in Ireland.
What will happen to failed asylum applicants and overstaying lawful migrants in the UK who come to Ireland via the Common Travel Area and the invisible Irish Border if future UK governments “go Danish”? This scenario is not fanciful; it is, or it should be, already on the Irish political radar screen.
If a Labour home secretary can credibly say that these matters are tearing Britain apart, leaders of EU member states would be unwise to ignore fracture lines in – and between – their own jurisdictions.
Mahmood is about to raise profound issues for asylum seeking in Britain. She asks whether asylum status should be permanent or purely temporary. In Ireland, a person granted asylum is immediately completely free to travel back and forth between the State from which they have fled persecution to this State. If asylum status is made temporary, it seems likely there would also be implications for family reunification. It begs the question of whether we are right to afford legal presumption of child status to those who claim it, as is now proposed.
The EU and Ireland must fundamentally rethink our failed responses to economic migration posing as asylum seeking.
