DUBLIN

RISHI SUNAK’S new law deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda is causing some people to wonder whether it is not a sinister plot to try and achieve a hard border on the island of Ireland.

The law, which was recently passed in Westminster, has seen UK asylum seekers rushing to Northern Ireland and across the open border, to seek asylum from deportation in Dublin.

“If this gets out of hand, it could force the Irish Government to essentially establish a hard border with Northern Ireland,” says migration expert Jack Kilburn. “Just to stem the flow. Right now, the Harris regime is bringing in legislation to allow these asylum seekers to be sent back to Britain, but there’s no obligation for London to accept them. And anyway, the British could just says, yeah, send them back to Northern Ireland it’s technically UK territory. If they do that, the asylum seekers will come back in an instant. If they sent them to London, they’d come back too, probably with the help of the London Government. This is a real dilemma for the Irish Government. Its own migration problems are enough difficulty, having to deal with perhaps tens of thousands of migrants coming from the UK would be impossible.”

Others have what they say is the obvious solution to the issue.

“Unite the island; put the political border where the economic border already is, in the sea,” says Gerry Pearse-Tone, a vegetable gardener from Belfast who was interned in 1971 but never served in the IRA. “Problem solved.”