Hot Potato: UK Vows No Illegal Migrant Returns from Ireland if France Refuses to Take Back Boat Migrants

An emerging diplomatic spat between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland looks to provide potential leverage for London over Brussels on the issue of illegal migrant returns to France, with Downing Street vowing to not accept returns from Dublin so long as Paris refuses to take back boat migrants who crossed the English Channel from the beaches along the French coast.

Following the British parliament’s passage of the Rwanda bill intended to finally clear legal hurdles and send illegal migrants to the East African nation rather than putting them up in hotels across the UK, recently installed Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Simon Harris ordered his justice ministry to draft emergency legislation to allow the “the return of inadmissible international protection applicants to the UK”.

Irish Justice Minister Helen McEntee has claimed that over 80 per cent of recent arrivals of illegal migrants have crossed into the country through the soft border with Northern Ireland, a constituent country of the United Kingdom.

She claimed that there has been a surge in such crossings given the concern amongst aliens that they may be removed from Britain to Rwanda.

Yet, a source from the UK government told the ruling Conservative Party-aligned Telegraph newspaper on Sunday: “We won’t accept any asylum returns from the EU via Ireland until the EU accepts that we can send them back to France.

“We are fully focused on operationalising our Rwanda scheme, and will continue working with the French to stop the boats from crossing the Channel.”

Since the implementation of the Brexit withdrawal from the European Union, there has been a massive surge in illegal migrants coming across the English Channel from France, which has refused to drag the small people-smuggler-operated dinghies back to shore in addition to refusing to accept the return of migrants after they arrived on British shores.

While apparently attempting to punish UK voters for leaving the European Union — at the same time being able to unload the expense of over 120,000 migrants onto the British taxpayer — Paris has even had the gall to charge London for the pleasure, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak agreeing last year to send £478 million (€541 million) over three years to fund French police patrols along the Calais coast and other people smuggler hot spots.

For the past few years, successive Conservative governments have been unable or unwilling to exert pressure on President Macron to accept migrant returns, with the Élysee Palace consistently claiming that the matter had to be settled at the EU level where there has been little appetite to alleviate the situation.

Brexit-opposing ex-prime minister and current top British diplomat David Cameron said last week that it was “simply not possible” to come to an agreement with France on the issue of migrant returns while suggesting that Brexit rather than the intractability of Paris or Brussels was to blame.

However, with Ireland potentially entering the fray, the UK could use the situation to put pressure on the European Union to finally come to terms with Brexit Britain and craft a replacement for the Dublin agreement that governed the return of illegals from the UK to other EU countries before Brexit.

Alternatively, Ireland could seek to impose hard border controls with Northern Ireland to prevent illegals from entering the country. Yet such a drastic move could jeopardise the Good Friday peace agreement on the Emerald Isle and trigger intervention from the United States, which chaired the negotiations of the 1998 settlement.

It comes as another 500 illegals crossed the English Channel between Friday and Saturday, taking the total to 7,167 since January, marking a new record for the first four months of any year.

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