Taoiseach says legislation needed on asylum seekers crossing Northern Irish border

Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris speaks to the media during a press conference as Minister for Justice Helen McEntee looks on at the City North Hotel, Co Meath, following his announcement he will run to become Fine Gael leader. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2024.

Immigration laws will need to be changed to allow Ireland to send back asylum seekers to the UK due to increasing numbers of applicants crossing the Northern Irish border, the Taoiseach has said.

Simon Harris said that Justice Minister Helen McEntee is working on legislation that will be brought forward in the coming weeks to address the fact that 80 per cent of those seeking asylum in Ireland come across the border with Ireland.

The Irish Mirror understands that this legislation will primarily seek to “close the loop” after the High Court last month ruled that Ireland’s designation of the UK as a “safe country” was unlawful.

A person who comes to Ireland seeking international protection must be assessed through the International Protection Office. It only becomes clear that a person has sought or been granted refuge in another country when they enter the process.

Speaking at Government Buildings on Thursday, Mr Harris said that laws will need to be changed to return people who have asylum to the UK back to the UK.

“We have a situation where we have a porous border,” the Taoiseach says.

“What the [Justice] minister is quite rightly putting into the public domain, it’s important to be transparent about this, is the flows and the trends that the International Protection Office are seeing in terms of the location which people came from.

“It raises very serious issues. It’s going to require legislative change. We’re going to need to change the law, in my view, in relation to this and we’re going to need to change it very quickly.

“At the moment we need to have a process in place that if somebody has status in another country, in this case the United Kingdom, and comes here seeking asylum, they should be returned to Britain. There will be a need for legislative change here.

“I know the Minister is working on legislation that needs to come forward and will come forward very quickly.

“There needs to be legal change. There needs to be more PSNI/Garda cooperation.

“This is now a very real and very significant issue, but it isn’t a simple one.”

Mr Harris added that the migration process is about people “fleeing persecution” and “not about a situation where you can be living safely in another country, have status potentially in that country and then come to our country and seek immigration status”.

He also admitted that people crossing the border from Northern Ireland into the Republic cannot be stopped.

Ms McEntee announced earlier this week that people coming from the country of origin with the highest number of applications in the previous three months will be subjected to an accelerated processing procedure.

However, sources stressed that this refers to a country of origin, not where a person is travelling from or where they have travelled through. This will be reviewed every three months.

Over one third of people seeking asylum in Ireland since the start of the year have been from Nigeria and arrivals’ applications will now be assessed more quickly.

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