Mr. Daniel Holder:

We have also been impressed by the work of the North West Migrants Forum. Our focus at CAJ tends always to be on the policy, the legislation and what can be changed. We know what the issues are, but it is powerful to hear some of the human stories of how it affects people's daily lives, how it splits families up and so forth. Ms Boyd might wish to elaborate, but the short answer is that we do know persons who are in the circumstances the Deputy outlined. I have come across Irish citizens who live in the north west but who will not get buses down to Dublin because of the indignity of being singled out because of their skin colour and being expected to show a passport that they have no reason, by law, to be carrying by virtue of being Irish citizens. Instead they either get a bus down to Sligo or drive down or avoid making that journey because they are singled out.

For all the talk about hard borders and the need to avoid a hard border with Brexit, the Deputy hit the nail on the head - there is an existing hard border for some groups of citizens. Partly, it is through these passport checks. The way we see it is that one either has passport checks on a border or one does not. Nobody wants blanket passport checks on the Border here. That would constitute a hard border. However, this halfway house of having legislation that expects some people to carry passports, and not others, and the inevitable racial discrimination that this leads to is quite shocking. It affects British and Irish citizens who are perceived not to be British or Irish citizens on the basis of skin colour. While there is a lot the UK could do in terms of not proceeding with this, it is unilaterally within the gift of the Irish Government and the Oireachtas to end it through a simple amendment to the Immigration Acts.

There is also the issue of somebody who is essentially a visa national, that is, somebody who is lawfully resident and, as the Deputy described, has lived for years in Derry, Dungannon, Newry or somewhere else and who simply cannot cross the Border without going through the very expensive and complex process of visa acquisition. That is very much within the gift of the authorities here to change with a proposal or something that would essentially allow persons in that situation, lawfully resident in the North either permanently or temporarily, to cross the Border as visitors without needing to require advance permission. That is not going the full step of full free movement to work and so forth, but merely a condition that would be brought in to allow people to cross the Border as part of their daily lives, for example, the family who live in Derry and want to visit a beach in Donegal but who currently cannot or some members of the family cannot do so, or they cannot go to a child's birthday party on the other side. That appears to be a very simple thing. It is not even an immigration issue in the sense that we are talking about people who are already here on this island. Ms Boyd might wish to elaborate on that.

We have come across the situation where, in terms of recent anecdotal reports, gardaí got on buses outside Dublin Airport and asked passengers for passports. Given that whoever got off the aeroplane has already been through immigration control, that is quite clearly An Garda Síochána implementing British immigration controls in the State because it is targeting people who it believes will be travelling on to the North. That is essentially implementing the UK's hostile environment policies, which is an extremely worrying development. The PSNI, thankfully, does not have an immigration-specific portfolio and remit in the North. The Home Office Border Force and immigration enforcement officers have engaged in this activity. As well as this being a North-South issue it is also a east-west problem, with Home Office immigration officers stopping people on domestic journeys at ports and borders in the North, quite often on the basis of skin colour or other ethnic attributes, and expecting people to display passports and the like.