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Rishi Sunak has claimed that a rise in asylum seekers heading to Ireland shows that the UK government’s Rwanda migration policy is “already having an impact” as a deterrent.
The UK prime minister told Sky News on Sunday that an increase in arrivals in Ireland suggested “people are worried about coming here” to Britain thanks to his flagship removals scheme.
His intervention came after Micheál Martin, Ireland’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister, said last week that asylum seekers were pursuing “sanctuary here and within the European Union as opposed to the potential of being deported to Rwanda”.
Helen McEntee, Ireland’s justice minister, has said more than 80 per cent of asylum seekers enter the country through Northern Ireland. There is no physical land border on the island of Ireland, which Dublin pushed hard to maintain during Brexit negotiations in order not to imperil Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace deal.
Martin criticised the Rwanda policy as a “knee-jerk reaction” to asylum seekers, but Sunak sought to present Martin’s remarks as proof the scheme was already having a successful deterrent effect.
The UK prime minister’s emergency Rwanda legislation passed into law earlier this week, following months of delay. But ministers have admitted it will take at least 10-12 weeks until the first flights to the east African nation take off.
Asked about Martin’s comments, Sunak said his “focus is on the UK and securing our borders” rather than Ireland, but insisted the Irish politician’s remarks illustrated that “illegal migration is a global problem”.
James Cleverly, UK home secretary, and McEntee will discuss the issue on Monday on the sidelines of a British-Irish conference in London.
McEntee will also bring emergency legislation to the Irish cabinet on Tuesday with a legal fix to enable asylum seekers to be returned to Britain. The Irish High Court ruled last month that the government’s designation of the UK as a “safe third country” where asylum seekers could be returned was unlawful.
Sunak is facing a tough week ahead, as his party braces itself for potentially devastating losses in the local and mayoral elections taking place on Thursday. On Sunday, Sunak declined to rule out a July election.
Chris Philp, policing minister, admitted that public sentiment was not favourable to the Conservatives. “Clearly, at the moment, people do feel grumpy with the government,” he told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.
He insisted that as the general election approached, however, voters would not consider the poll a “referendum on grumpiness” but “a choice — who do you want to run the country?”
Philp also declined to set a cap on net migration after former immigration minister Robert Jenrick called for it to be limited to the tens of thousands, but insisted the UK government was “committed to substantially reducing legal migration”.
Immigration has become a flashpoint issue in Ireland — where a general election is due by early next year.
Protesters clashed with police last week at a disused school in County Wicklow that had been earmarked for accommodation for asylum seekers following a string of arson attacks on other proposed accommodation sites and anti-immigration protests.
New Taoiseach Simon Harris is also facing pressure to deal with a tent city in central Dublin, where some of the 1,758 asylum seekers for whom the government has been unable to provide accommodation are camped out.
Harris declined to comment on the UK’s Rwanda policy but said Ireland’s immigration policy would not be “undermined” by any other country’s plans.
“This country will not in any way, shape or form provide a loophole for anybody else’s migration challenges,” Harris told reporters.
Ireland is backing a new EU migration pact that will harmonise asylum procedures and speed up claims processing.
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