Just on the new EU pact on Asylum and Migration, there does appear to be some potential positives. The details are
here but what a lot of it will mean in practice is hard to decipher.
The pact seems to be focused on relieving pressure at what they call "the EU’s external borders" where a "mandatory border procedure" will apply. I thought this meant countries like Greece, Spain and Italy but I've now learned Ireland qualifies because of the border in the north.
What this means is if an asylum applicant is considered a danger to national security or public order, if they have misled the authorities with false information or withheld information or if they're from a country with a refugee grant rate below 20%, then EU member states at the external borders will be obliged to refuse them entry or detain them in designated zones until their applications are processed.
Persons subject to the asylum border procedure are not authorised to enter the member state’s territory. They will also have to reside at or in proximity to the external border or transit zones or in other designated locations within the territory of a country.
In practice, what this suggests is that under the pact, Ireland could be compelled to detain asylum seekers from countries with high rejection rates like Nigeria, Algeria, Georgia, Albania & Pakistan or anyone who "lost" their passports in transit or anyone considered a security threat.
These migrants will then be then subject to a rapid asylum process which must take less then three months. If their application is unsuccessful, they must be deported within a further three months.
The removal bit is the part Irish authorities seem to have a massive problem with and there doesn't seem to be much in the pact addressing that. What happens if we can't deport a bogus asylum claimant within three months because their country of origin won't provide us travel documents? The pact doesn't offer any solutions.
The pact does say that "irregular migrants" have to undergo a screening process within seven days of arrival which will include identification, health and security checks, as well as fingerprinting and registration in the Eurodac database. This might help us reduce the spread of diseases like tuberculosis and HIV.
But the Irish State could be doing all these already so why sign up to the pact when it will mean we will be subject to the negative aspects?
The pact says that EU member states at the external borders under pressure will be able to send a share of their asylum seekers to other EU member states for processing or these countries can pay something in the region of €20,000 per head not to have to process them.
There will be a minimum annual number for relocations from member states where most persons enter the EU or apply to member states less exposed to such arrivals. This number is set at 30,000, while the minimum annual number for financial contributions will be fixed at €600 million.
While it says we won't be forced to take relocated asylum seekers, we may have to pay at least €600 million per year if we don't. That doesn't sound like a great deal considering we pay nothing now.
It's possible this new border procedure will reduce arrivals in southern Europe, many of whom end up in Ireland, but it could do that whether or not we sign up to the pact. It's also possible the pact could increase arrivals as countries like Italy could do less to impede trafficking in the Med, believing they can just send the migrants on elsewhere which our government could willingly accept.
Helen McEntee sys that between
50-70% of IP applicants to Ireland are people who have applied for asylum elsewhere in the EU. The pact is supposed to introduce "a simple, swifter take-back notification," but that's what the Dublin Agreement was supposed to do which never happened, and what about the ones from the UK?
So while there are some potential positives to the pact, it appears we could either receive those benefits without opting into it or we could implement them ourselves and shield ourselves from the negatives.