Earlier this week, Ireland’s newly installed Taoiseach, Simon Harris, made an outrageous proposal to deploy 100 policemen to control immigration along the border with Northern Ireland. Harris is trying to prevent an influx of immigrants crossing the border before Rishi Sunak’s plan to deport immigrants to Rwanda is implemented.
It doesn’t feel like that long ago that his predecessor Leo Varadkar was stressing to European Union leaders how important it was to avoid a hard border. To make his point Varadkar even went as far as highlighting an old news story about an IRA bomb which went off at a customs post in the 70s, killing nine people. Yet for some reason, the moment it became politically inconvenient to defend the open border, Dublin suddenly changed its tune.
As a former customs officer patrolling the border region in Ireland in the early 2000s, I can attest to the fact that life for everyone is far sweeter without a hard border and customs inspections.
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