Closing the border to police immigration is a futile and unnecessary demand -a deviation from explaining why race riots are passively tolerated

Predictably enough, the  Westminster right wing and the DUP did have to turn it  into a row about the border. It was quickly revealed that the Somali  (whoops correction) the Sudanese suspect entered NI illegally from the south and was  granted leave to remain three years ago. Cue firestorm over  immigration policy and in particular -wouldn’t you know it? –  the open border and how to police it .

From The Times

The UK has returned only one asylum seeker to Ireland since a post-Brexit deal was signed in 2020 and the government is now preparing to crack down on the border route being used as a “back door” for illegal immigration after the Belfast attack.

Home Office insiders said the common travel area (CTA) with Ireland was “a massive Achilles’ heel” as concerns rose over illegal migrants taking advantage of the lack of routine immigration checks to enter the UK.

There are 2,370 asylum seekers in supported accommodation in Northern Ireland, 2.5 per cent of all asylum seekers across the UK. 

Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said the human rights of asylum seekers were often being prioritised over national security. 

The UK Home Office revealed overnight that in the past year it had apprehended more than 900 “immigration offenders” abusing the open land border.

The Dublin government had a prompt reply

Data from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in Dublin, however, showed 18,500 people had sought asylum in 2024, of which 90% were thought to have travelled from Great Britain to Ireland via a flight or ferry to Belfast.

Before 2019, the number of people seeking asylum in Ireland was relatively small, about 5,000, commensurate with the experience of a small country on the farthest outreaches of Europe.

That number grew significantly between 2022 and 2024, when it peaked at 18,500. Just 10% of people applied for asylum at an airport or port, while 90% made a first-time application in person at the International Protection Office in Dublin. This figure includes some who may have entered the country legally and days, weeks or months later sought asylum.

In 2025 and 2026 to date, the proportion of asylum seekers applying at the office in person were 88% and 90% respectively.

Without physical checks on the Irish border, neither the UK nor Irish governments can verify the precise numbers of people crossing the border illegally, but in 2024 Ireland’s then justice minister, Helen McEntee, said publicly that 80% were coming over the land border.

Where does that leave us? In NI there are 65,000 “ people of colour”. 124,000 mainly white born outside the UK, mainly from the EU. Irish travellers 2610, Roma 1259.

In the Republic  23.5% foreign born including UK, Asian 3.3%, Black Irish 1.5%. The Republic’s population has expanded dramatically  in line with growing prosperity from 2.8 mn in 1961, to 5.4 mn last year, and projected to rise to 6.7 mn by 2060.

All manageable, surely –   although the new EU-Irish immigration rules llook very complicated and slow  

This  population rise  in the Republic since the WW2  has not  yet kept pace with the rise in Northern Ireland’s population which began with the  introduction  of the Welfare State in 1948, as my namesake Prof Brian Mercer Walker points out slightly mischieviously  in the Irish Times today.

 David Mc Williams described graphically the mass emigration which afflicted the new Irish state in its first 50 years (“Britain was a saviour for Irish migrants. One of those sons will captain England next week,” June 6th). By 1961, an estimated 45 per cent of all those born in Ireland between 1926 and 1936 had left.

It is interesting to note that Northern Ireland in the same period did not face this problem. The government of Northern Ireland can be rightly criticised for not creating an inclusive society or ensuring full civil rights for all.

At the same time, this government pursued policies which brought benefits for every citizen, unionist and nationalist. In their social policies, unionist ministers, especially John M Andrews, insisted with the London treasury that as part of the UK its people were entitled to parity in social services and equal standards with elsewhere in the UK.

Following the Butler Act in Britain, the Education Act (Northern Ireland) 1947, gave free secondary education for all, which was not available in the South until the 1960s. The National Health Service, established in 1949, benefited everyone….

The failings of Northern Ireland in its first 50 years are well known. Its benefits and successes, due to these effective government policies, deserve attention.

Today, the situation is very different. With new Irish government social and economic policies, the southern population has grown remarkably. Still, viewed over the last 100 years, the rate of population growth in the South has yet to catch up with the North. 

  One violent attack  by an immigrant or anybody else is one too many.  Close coordination between the two governments  over policing and data sharing is plainly the right approach. The open  border survived Brexit and will survive race riots. Despite the disaster of Brexit my ideal remains interchangeability  of government arrangements and citizenship in these islands.  On the present situation,  this comment by James Nancy in the Bele Tel deserves an extended extract.

 Violent crimes in Northern Ireland elicit responses so well rehearsed as to have become ritualised: clichéd language running deep and deadening grooves into our collective consciousness.

Every time a woman is murdered in her home — almost always by a white Northern Irish man she knows well — we can set our watches by the expressions of concern that flow from political leaders who then seem to forget about institutionalised misogyny within days.

And so too have racist riots become an annual occurrence in the North, a predictable consequence any time someone of a minority background is accused of a serious crime.

Last year, there were the nights of rioting in Ballymena, which were themselves a sort of horrific reprise of the year before, when minority citizens of Belfast were burned out of their homes and businesses by mobs.

Because of this history, there was a sickening sense of inevitability building through Tuesday as people waited for the calls to go out on social media for protests, for the injunction by politicians to behave “responsibly”, and for the very real safety fears of minority communities to get only a passing mention in a tokenistic, rhetorical gesture towards the notions of basic decency and human empathy.

The political rhetoric surrounding these incidents has become utterly bizarre and full of a confused grammar than betrays both personal and moral cowardice…..

There are reports of “fires targeting homes”, with the sentence structure making it seem as if flames are a sentient body capable of attacking families in their residences. (Perhaps the PPS can launch a case against the tendency of carbon-based substances to burn, or charge the chemical process of change with attempted murder?)

There has too been another round of “legitimate concerns” about immigration raised, which are based on views so comically untrue that no satire of Facebook bigotry could best them.

How many rounds of arson and violence do the minority citizens of Belfast have to live through before the leaders of political unionism learn some reasonable hesitancy and become more concerned with safety than with the prospect of offending far-right activists on social media?

… The key issue is that racist mobs keep trying to murder minorities in our city. The problem is that pogroms have become functionally permitted by our political culture, treated as a seemingly tolerable annual tradition or seasonal occurrence: a sort of perverted Morris dance that leaders are ready to jig along to if it means they can keep making false statements about immigration.

There is much to be done to tackle racism and intercommunal tension in Belfast, but the first and easiest course of action is a change in our leaders’ rhetoric about minorities.

The cost of creating a safer and more tolerant city is no higher than politicians learning to speak responsibly and for them to start treating the safety of minorities with the same care they currently take to avoid offending internet racists.

Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London