Are the government living in some mad-delusional-upside-down world, or do they think that endless bluster and bullying can distract voters from the appalling mess they are making in mismanaging immigration?
Just five days ago, we had Taoiseach Leo Varadkar telling Gript’s Ben Scallan that Ireland had “very robust checks” at our airport and ports, saying we “even now had checks for people coming off planes”.
"Part of my job is to tell the truth about migration": Leo Varadkar recently said it's a “far-right myth” to say that refugees must apply for asylum in the first safe country they enter.@Ben_Scallan asks if he was spreading "misinformation" when he made the same claim in 2019: pic.twitter.com/DmB2yvzw8a
— gript (@griptmedia) January 10, 2024
In the same week, we had Junior Minister Neale Richmond on Virgin Media’s Tonight Show asserting that it was a big fat lie to claim that people were destroying their passport or identifying papers before entering the country.
While accusing a woman from Ballinrobe of spreading misinformation and disinformation, Richmond said: “We talk about people being flown in, documentation being ripped up, and I have to say this, this is feeding into misplaced fears. It’s utter rubbish”, before adding now-familiar statements about “anti-immigration and racism” rhetoric.
But facts, being stubborn things, suggest that the insistences of both Varadkar and Richmond are incorrect: unless RTÉ have now joined the terrible and fearsome ‘far-right’ in spreading this supposed ‘misinformation’.
As Prime Time’s Paul Murphy reported:
Almost 70% of people who applied for international protection at Dublin Airport in 2023 arrived without a correct identity document, figures supplied by the Department of Justice to Prime Time show.
Just over one-third of all asylum applications in Ireland last year were made at the capital’s airport.
The figures do not include those fleeing the war in Ukraine, who are permitted to stay in Ireland without having to go through the asylum process.
In total, 3,285 people arrived to Dublin Airport without a valid identity document, representing 69.75% of all asylum applications made at the airport.
“It is almost exclusively the case that those who present without documentation claim asylum,” a spokesperson for the Department of Justice told Prime Time.
What might an Taoiseach and his Junior Minister have to say to that? How can we have “very robust checks” if thousands of people are allowed entry without having any documentation?
Are RTÉ talking “utter rubbish”? Are they spreading misinformation when they acknowledge that the people presenting without passports/identification would, of course, have to have actually had a passport when getting on the plane?
While it should be impossible to get on an international flight without a valid identity document, would-be asylum applicants may board an aircraft using a “borrowed” or false passport which they may destroy or return to their agent or trafficker during the flight.
Is that an acceptable situation? The authorities are, however inadvertently, assisting human traffickers when they allow them, in effect, to force “would-be asylum applicants” to return a false passport to them, presumably so they can then traffic another person, perhaps to Ireland, and continue this fraud infinitum.
Of course, while some migrants will very likely be afraid of their trafficker, there is likely more to the situation than that one particular scenario.
RTÉ also reports:
The Irish Refugee Council also points out on its website that “some people may fear if they produce” a passport on arrival that “they will be immediately removed back to the country of origin or the country from which they have travelled from.”
And why is that, exactly? For some of them at least, is it because they are coming, as thousands have done before them, from countries which are designated as safe countries? But if there is no real basis for their asylum application then shouldn’t they, in fact, be sent back immediately to their country of origin?
There’s also another factor that most media commentary steadfastly ignores. Isn’t it likely that an unknown quantity of migrants claiming asylum who destroy or fail to produce documentation don’t want their real identity known?
Are they are deliberately concealing who they are because they have a criminal record or something in their past they would rather the authorities did not know? In my opinion it would be extremely naïve to think otherwise.
Despite several media articles in the past week suggesting the otherwise, as my colleague Matt Treacy has previously confirmed, fingerprints taken as part of the asylum process are checked against Eurodac, but this is not generally used to check for criminal records.
In a newspaper report headed “State cracking down on international protection applicants who have committed crimes in other jurisdictions”, Minister McEntee is quoted as saying that:
“Each applicant has their fingerprint checked against the Eurodac system which allows officials to establish if the applicant has previously applied for international protection in another member state.”
However, Eurodac, according to the EU body EUR-Lex, “is an EU database that stores the fingerprints of international protection applicants or people who have crossed a border illegally.”
“The purpose of Eurodac is to give member states information to help them to decide which country is responsible for a person’s international protection application.”
In fact, EUR-Lex warns that Eurodac can only be used by police forces and the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation to compare fingerprints linked to criminal investigations in very particular circumstances and as “only as a last resort.”
Furthermore, it states that “No Eurodac data may be shared with non-EU countries (other than Iceland and Norway)”.
If fingerprints are checked as a matter of course against other international criminal databases, then the Minister has failed to make that clear or to name said databases.
Of course, as Gript Editor John McGuirk pointed out, its a year since Matt Treacy was reporting on this platform that, in 2022, almost 5,000 migrants claiming asylum had arrived here without passports and were taken into the country and into the system.
Gript's @MattTreacy2 was able to report on the extraordinary numbers arriving with no passport literally a year ago. The figure was 5,000 then.https://t.co/x6qGUs0vEb https://t.co/hRs822lIOM
— John McGuirk (@john_mcguirk) January 13, 2024
We do (sort of) know who some of those arrivals say they are, notwithstanding their lack of documents, because they’ve been before the courts, as my column from September relayed.
A man who had arrived in the country on Tuesday, and who had no passport or identifying documents, attacked a woman in a “random” face-slashing incident the very next day.
The woman noticed the man in her front garden and asked if he was okay. He responded by lunging at her and slashing her face and hand.
Garda Siobhan Frisbee told the court that the incident left the woman “waking up having nightmares” and that she had suffered “serious facial injuries in the course of a serious unprovoked random attack”.
In court, the man claimed to be French-Tunisian (we don’t know if that’s true); that his name was Sami Skhiri (we don’t know if that’s true); that he is 34 years old and a a software engineer (we don’t know if that’s true) – and that he was Jesus (we know that’s not true).
Gardaí told the court that it took hours to get a name due to the accused being uncooperative. Garda Frisbee said she could not say “if he is the person he says he is”.
Then there’s the case a man calling himself Anatol Botnari, who was charged with sexual assault of a juvenile, but for whom a passport was not produced in court.
Another case involves a triple-murder suspect from Zimbabwe who was, according to Zimbabwean media, living in an Irish asylum centre under a false name, and ended up before the courts here for separate offences.
Yet another involves another asylum applicant who may (or may not) be Moroccan, and who pleaded guilty to subjecting his former partner “to a prolonged attack, during which he forced her into a car boot before repeatedly punching and smashing her face against the vehicle’s interior”. He was also wanted for arson in Germany.
Yet anyone who wonders if maybe, just maybe, some people who arrive here without passports might have a nefarious reason for not wishing to be identified is immediately shouted down as a bigot. a racist, and not fit for polite society. Indeed, there are now whole organisations, funded by the taxpayer, the EU and global corporations, waiting to cancel you for even having that thought.
Do the government take Irish people for idiots? Do they think the public can not see for themselves what’s happening? Does any of this look like a “very robust system” to even the most disinterested observer?
The truth is that the system is in disarray and the government’s bluster can no longer conceal the mess they have made. And the people are no longer willing to put up with this shambles.