Niall Ó Donnghaile (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Commissioner and his colleagues. A number of committee colleagues have raised the concerns about the emergence of a hard border. Certainly from my own perspective at previous meetings and my party's perspective, I would have been very clear in that regard.

I want to raise with the Commissioner something that he will be familiar with, that is, the concern that there is an emergence of a hard border of sorts for people who are travelling by bus across the Border at present. The Commissioner will have received correspondence from the Committee for the Administration of Justice, CAJ, in the North and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, here in the South about their concerns about the racial profiling of people who are travelling across the Border on public transport.

I have three questions, which I will ask in bulk to save time. I have asked this first question of Mr. Harris's predecessors. Has there been a strategic policy decision by Garda leadership to increase checks of passports on public transportation along the Border? Under what legislation are these checks taking place? If the Commissioner has not seen the correspondence from the ICCL or CAJ, they question the legality of some of these checks. Has there been such a strategic policy decision taken because no doubt the checks are happening? Travelling down to this institution, I myself witnessed it. Have gardaí been directed that they should tell the difference between Irish and EU citizens who do not have to produce passports or papers and non-EU citizens who may have to produce papers?