A soft-spoken young woman pulls a large suitcase up Mount Street to the International Protection Office in Dublin city centre, her final stop on a long journey from South Africa through Britain to seek asylum in Ireland as a refugee.
“I’ve heard that compared to the UK it’s better here, and that over there the law is always changing,” she says gently, before heading inside to take her shot at a new life.
Many, but not all, of the people met by The Irish Times as they waited to be seen at the office this week had travelled to Ireland through the Common Travel Area with Britain, a route the Government has said is being used by a large proportion of people who claim asylum in Ireland. The Common Travel Area is a long-standing arrangement that permits ease of travel between the two countries.
The Government has aired concerns that plans announced by British prime minister Keir Starmer this week to toughen the United Kingdom’s migration policy may cause more people to come to the Republic to lodge asylum claims, as they can travel from Britain through Northern Ireland.
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“I am committed to ensuring that Ireland is not viewed more favourably than the UK by those seeking to claim asylum,” Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan said this week.
Both the Irish and UK governments presume that asylum seekers are motivated by “pull factors” of favourable treatment or legislation, and select where to travel to accordingly.
This is not the case, says Sinead Marmion, an immigration lawyer with the Belfast-based Phoenix Law. Many of her clients are trafficked: brought in and put to work in nail salons or in cannabis farming, paying back debts their traffickers claim they owe.
“A lot of the time, those people won’t have any control over their journey or know where they’ll end up, in my experience. There will be people who have no idea where they are,” Marmion says.
“Pull factors – in my view, that’s really a myth.”
Some people appear to travel to Ireland if the United Kingdom doesn’t work out for them, however.
A Belarusian couple seemed determined and full of hope as they strode up to the International Protection Office door this week, their hands firmly clasped.
“We were in Scotland, but Scotland separated us. We are a family,” the man said. They left their home because their area became occupied by the Russian military, he said, due to the invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.
A raven-haired young woman from Vietnam was shivering in the cold as she waited to enter. Why come to Ireland?
“London no good,” she said. How did she get here? “Belfast.”
She typed a phrase into a translation app and held up her phone. “I took the ferry,” the text read.
As rhetoric on the issue hardens in the wake of protests outside accommodation centres, the Irish Government has presented the use of this route by asylum seekers as an “abuse” of the Common Travel Area and as illegal.
This is rejected by human rights organisations that work with refugees.
“Under international law, every person has the right to seek asylum once they are in a country’s territory. The manner in which someone arrives does not remove that right,” says John Lannon, chief executive of Doras, which works to protect the rights of people from a migrant background.
Either way, Ireland and the UK are on course to diverge in their asylum and migration law in ways that may have complex implications for the Common Travel Area.
Ireland is implementing a hard-fought deal agreed by European Union member states, the EU migration and asylum pact, which aims to achieve rapid processing of claims, cross-border co-operation, sharing of information, and more deportations.
The UK plans to overhaul its system in a different way. Its plan is partly inspired by policies introduced by EU countries, but may include some changes that are incompatible with EU law or older international human rights treaties.
Adding to the complexity is that the UK government may face legal challenges to the implementation of some of its planned changes in Northern Ireland.
Article Two of the Windsor Framework, the post-Brexit settlement for Northern Ireland, prevents certain equality and human rights from being watered down, including those of asylum seekers.
The Northern Ireland High Court ruled in 2024 that a since-abandoned Westminster plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda could not apply in the North on that basis.
“We would expect that anything that would breach the Windsor Framework wouldn’t be applied across the UK,” said Úna Boyd, an immigration solicitor with the Belfast-based Committee on the Administration of Justice, an independent human rights group.
The Irish Government uses the number of asylum claims made in the International Protection Office in Dublin city centre compared with those entering the State at ports or airports as a proxy for the proportion of asylum seekers who arrive via Northern Ireland.
For the year to date, this proportion of total claims at the IPO was 87 per cent, with the remainder registering at ports and airports. The Department of Justice believes that a “significant proportion” of the 87 per cent comprises people who entered over the land Border. This assumption is “based on the experience of staff and others working in the field, and based on the material gathered at interviews”, according to a spokesman.
Asylum seekers also continue to travel in the other direction, into the UK, via Northern Ireland. There are “established smuggler routes” through Dublin Airport, particularly for people from Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea who are seeking to enter the UK, according to Marmion.
“I would hear a lot of that in my clients’ stories where they come to Dublin and are taken in a car and then left off at the Home Office in Belfast,” she said.
With Britain’s departure from the EU, it left an agreement whereby asylum seekers can be returned to be processed in the first European country they entered.
Ireland and Britain agreed informal, “non-legally binding operational arrangements” to return asylum seekers to each other in 2020, the British Home Office said last year.
Sinn Féin has urged the Government to pursue a formal bilateral agreement with the UK on returning asylum seekers.
Given how difficult this has been for Britain to agree with France, and for EU states to agree with each other, this could be a fraught process, particularly if one state fears it would end up taking in more people as a result.
“Whether people are in Britain coming from Ireland or vice versa, my guess is that it will be a much greater level of people in this State who have come from Britain,” said Sinn Féin TD Matt Carthy, who chairs the Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Home Affairs and Migration.
[ Michael McDowell: Britain’s asylum shake-up poses big problems for IrelandOpens in new window ]
Does the British government have more freedom to change its asylum law than Ireland does, because it is no longer in the EU?
Yes and no.
The British government has said Brexit has freed it to make support for asylum seekers discretionary rather than automatic because it is no longer bound by a 2004 EU law. However, the UK had its own domestic law providing for accommodation for asylum seekers dating back to 1999.
London has also cited measures by various EU member states as an inspiration for its proposals, including the Netherlands, France, Austria, the Czech Republic and Belgium.
A major source of the UK’s ideas is Denmark, which has more leeway than most EU states because it has an opt-out from joint legislation covering migration and asylum.
[ Immigration: UK looks to Denmark for major shake-up of systemOpens in new window ]
Ireland also has an opt-out on this, though a slightly different one, designed around the protection of the Common Travel Area with Britain.
The main obstacle to Britain’s plans may ultimately not be EU law, but older human rights law that predates the EU such as the European Convention on Human Rights and UN Refugee Convention.
Some of what the UK government has announced may never be intended to be implemented.
Denmark’s strategy for the past decade has been to project an unfriendly image to refugees, including with laws aimed to send a message rather than to be used.
Its 2015 Jewellery Law allowed authorities to seize the valuables of refugees to help pay for their accommodation. The Danish government ran ads in Lebanese media announcing it, hoping to dissuade Syrian refugees. Government figures show that it was actually rarely used and some years not at all.
The big picture is that the UK is far from an outlier. Efforts are well under way across Europe to harden asylum laws, influenced by the rise of anti-immigration politics over the last decade. Ireland appears to be going in the same direction.
