Britain’s Rwanda scheme has now upset Ireland. Matthew Partridge reports
Prime minister Rishi Sunak may have hoped that the passage of his Rwanda legislation – which allows for illegal asylum seekers to be sent off to Rwanda for processing – would mark the end of the troubles surrounding the scheme, says Nimo Omer in The Guardian. Instead, it now seems to threaten the harmony between the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
The apparent uptick in the flow of asylum seekers crossing the border from Northern Ireland to avoid being deported to Rwanda may have been “much to Sunak’s delight”, but it has angered Dublin, which “is pushing through emergency legislation to send back asylum seekers who arrive though the UK”, despite the UK saying it will not accept them.
Capacity constraints
The Irish government believes that, whatever is said in public, the UK may have little choice but to take the asylum seekers back, says the Financial Times. The two countries signed a deal four years ago that allowed for Ireland to return asylum seekers to the UK. That treaty has been halted by an Irish High Court ruling that the Rwanda scheme meant the UK could no longer be considered a “safe third country”. Dublin is preparing legislation to overrule this and has said it expects the deal to be honoured.
The problem has been made worse by the decision of the UK government to locate an increasing share of asylum seekers in Belfast, with numbers tripling since 2021, says Newton Emerson in The Irish Times. As a result, Northern Ireland is “now much closer to a capacity constraint than is realised”, and many refugees end up homeless. This in turn means that even a “relatively trivial” further increase in arrivals from mainland Britain could prompt a much larger movement of “desperate” people across the border.
