Deportation of failed asylum seekers and others has become a talking point since the statement by Minister for Justice Helen McEntee in relation to the chartering of flights to take such persons out of the jurisdiction.
While this has been greeted, whether favourably or otherwise, as a new innovation, such flights have been used in the past.
They appear to have ceased since the Covid lockdown and possibly as a consequence of the unrelenting efforts of establishment politicians from across the political spectrum and from the advocacy migrant and racism NGOs to undermine any attempt to tackle what the state itself now clearly recognises is a huge problem.
What is also interesting is that while this state is not a member of FRONTEX (the EU’s border control agency) that its cooperation with that body had up until recent years included joint deportations using chartered flights which in many cases were paid for by FRONTEX, including what I could find as a last reported flight in 2019.
While Senator Michael McDowell cast a dubious eye on the Minister’s proposal when speaking last evening in the debate on the Migration and Asylum Pact, his own period as Minister for Justice might suggest that it is not such a bad idea. McDowell said that he had used such a mechanism but claimed that “they are almost impossible to work.”
Among the reasons he cited were that “They are always subject to absenteeism by would-be deportees and to court injunctions and they are immensely expensive to operate. They do not work. This illusion that the Minister is putting out and that will solve the whole problem is completely misconceived.”
He is right in that chartered flights in themselves are not the solution, but surely they are part of such a solution? If the state speeds up processing time and if it continues to drop its own interventions in asylum cases and appeals and thus greatly increase the numbers of deportation orders that are effected – rather than in over 80% of instances as we have shown been allowed to fall often by default – then such chartered flights would not only be effective but necessary.
They would also appear to be far more cost effective than individual deportations, and more so if the state resumes a more proactive relationship with FRONTEX in arranging such flights in joint operations that would also include other EU states and which are capable of transporting large numbers of persons at one time.
In a response to a Parliamentary Question on December 8, 2004, McDowell – when Minister for Justice – provided a table of statistics that would indicate that the individual costs of deportations through chartered flights – even allowing for inflation over the past 20 years – was much lower, and would still be much lower than the alternative of individual Garda escorted flights.
According to those statistics, there had been 300 persons deported by chartered planes between January 1, 2002 and November 11, 2004. The total cost of those operations was €1,280,501 and McDowell stated that the Garda Commissioner had informed him that “charter flights involve a lower ratio of Garda escorts to deportees than is the case using conventional schedule flights, resulting in savings to the Garda budget.”
The average cost per deportation was €4,268 but that was inflated by three flights which carried just one person to Gambia, two to Algeria and six to Nigeria. The average cost for each person on one flight carrying 66 deportees in November 2004 was just €1,253. Compare that to an average cost of Garda escorted individual deportations between 2022 and May this year of €10,338.
Costs would be drastically reduced not only through chartered flights but also if part of joint FRONTEX operations, as was made clear by McDowell’s successor as Minister Dermot Ahern who in a written response of November 17, 2010 to a PQ from Lucinda Creighton stated that not only was FRONTEX a “very significant asset in returning persons to distant countries,” but that to date in 2010 that FRONTEX had “funded 7 chartered flights in which we participated at no cost.”
Surely then, reviving – if lapsed – and extending this co-operation with FRONTEX would make eminent sense. The state must also ask itself whether the easing of and perhaps ending of such joint operations was not another instance of the NGOs and elected representatives speaking on their behalf pressuring the state and demonising FRONTEX as some sort of rogue agency.
Anyone who doubts that need only examine the records of Dáil and Seanad debates and questions. In 2010, Minister Dermot Ahern was able to provide details of a significant number of joint FRONTEX operations to remove persons who had no business being in the state, and there was little objection to this.
In contrast you can find examples in more recent years of Gerry Adams. Richard Boyd Barrett, Clare Daly, Alice Mary Higgins, Paul Gavan, Pa Daly, Catherine Connolly and others effectively attacking FRONTEX and in many cases demanding that the state have nothing to do with it. And they will tell you, some of the same people, that they support secure borders.
In contrast then, you had Carol Nolan asking to what extent the state was engaging with FRONTEX and indeed FRONTEX own claim regarding the complicity of NGOs in the smuggling of illegal immigrants in collaboration with criminal gangs.
If the state is serious about using chartered flights then it must also increase the number of passengers by addressing the evident abuses and tardiness of the processing system. It must also engage in a more proactive way with FRONTEX and other states in jointly removing persons who have failed to satisfy any requirement to remain in the state, and who in some instance present a positive danger to legitimate and indeed other illegal residents of the Irish state.