Asked a few months ago on Newstalk about the Irish Government’s plans to fine airlines for every passenger who disembarks without a passport, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary had a short, and apt, reply: They have passports when they get on the plane.
This, as any person who has boarded a flight anywhere in Europe for the past decade knows, is self-evidently true: The very last thing that happens at the boarding gate is that the staff at the airport check your boarding pass, and your passport. Failure to produce either means you don’t get on the flight.
Despite this, as we all know, thousands of people in recent years have presented at immigration in Dublin Airport without documents. That means that there are but two explanations: A mass failure of airport security in other countries, allowing people to board planes without a passport, or that the people presenting without documents are deliberately destroying those documents in flight, or after de-planing.
Yesterday, the Minister for Justice announced a new provision to fine airlines more for these instances, as Ben reported:
The Courts, Civil Law, Criminal Law and Superannuation (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2024 will increase the fines on carriers to a maximum of €5,000 from the previous maximum of €3,000. McEntee has today signed two orders to give effect to these increased fines which will apply to carriers from 12 August 2024.
“Carriers such as airlines and ferry companies play an essential role in protecting and upholding our borders, and they are obligated to ensure their passengers have the necessary valid passports, ID cards and visas to travel to Ireland,” McEntee said about the move.
“My Department is working closely with them to support them in these obligations, including through the provision of training. However, where the rules are not followed, increased fines will now apply.
“Increasing carrier liability fines brings us into line with our counterparts across the EU and are necessary to ensure that measures introduced 21 years ago retain their effectiveness.
That this is a nonsensical law should be evident to anybody who has ever travelled inbound through Dublin Airport. Take somebody, for example, who flies with O’Leary’s airline, Ryanair: You de-plane usually on the tarmac outside the airport, and then walk for 10-15 minutes through the airport building before arriving at passport control. En route, there are multiple bathrooms, multiple bins, and multiple places to stop. It is perfectly possible, should one wish to do so, to stop and destroy a travel document on that route.
What’s more, Ryanair (and all other airlines) are not responsible for the security or the safety of people on that route: That is within the confines of the airport, and thus is the responsibility of the Dublin Airport Authority.
As such, the Government seems intent on punishing airlines for something that airlines cannot reasonably be expected to control. In any case, the bigger question is why people are destroying their travel documents – and again here, the airlines are not to blame.
The simplest explanation for why people destroy their travel documents is that Irish policy has made it advantageous to do so. The current policy mandates that these people be admitted to the country, and then housed at the state’s expense while efforts are made to establish whether they have a right to be here. On multiple occasions, such people have then absconded from their accommodation and disappeared – possibly across the international border on the island, though we cannot say for sure.
In any case, not having a passport means you get in. Which is the exact opposite of what not having a passport is supposed to result in.
An alternative policy, of course, would be to deny such people entry and hold them in the airport in a secure facility until such time as their identity can be established. This should not be impossible, since the airlines should have a copy of the passports they used to board their planes. Proper EU co-operation would match the photos provided by these people at points of exit from their origin countries to photos taken in Dublin Airport. Otherwise, what is the point of all those photo-scanners used at border control points within the EU?
Instead, for some reason, the Minister seems more intent on punishing airlines than she is lawbreakers, and deterring airlines rather than illegal migrants. She is surely smart enough to know that these fines will not work – so what’s the objective?
The objective, I fear, is to pin the blame elsewhere: to distract the public by pinning responsibility on private companies rather than public incompetence. As I wrote yesterday, such a play is deeply in keeping with the new Taoiseach’s predilection for distraction politics, and for giving the public occasional shiny objects to marvel at rather than doing the harder work of fixing problems.
The airlines, I assume, will not take this lying down. Nor should they. It’s shameful.