The politics of the European Union are perplexing to say the least.
The newly announced commission attracts media attention in much the same way as the Aintree Grand National. Silly, boastful claims by the parliamentary groupings in the EU parliament that they have done well or criticisms by the less successful that the gender balance of the commission is skewed may fill newspaper columns.
The justice portfolio awarded to Ireland’s commissioner, Michael McGrath, is not of much consequence, other than to mark out our political perch in the EU’s pecking order.
Of much greater significance is the question of whether the EU is at last capable of realising that it has a massive and urgent problem in respect of migration and asylum-seeking. Like Ireland, Austria nominated its finance minister to be a commissioner. Like Ireland, Austria did not nominate a woman alternative. Just as McGrath has had to settle for the post as commissioner for justice and the rule of law, Magnus Brunner, who hoped for a financial portfolio, is now the commissioner with responsibility for migration and home affairs.
As someone who served as Ireland’s minister of the EU’s Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Council from 2002 to 2007, I saw how most member states split domestic and European ministers’ responsibility for home affairs (migration, criminal law, security and policing) from justice (courts, law reform and human rights). In Ireland’s case, the minister for justice acted at an EU level in both areas. Brunner’s position is regarded as the more senior role for JHA council purposes.
Austria has always been seen as a conservative EU member in relation to immigration and asylum-seeking. New control measures there have seen asylum-seeking fall dramatically by 40 per cent in the last year.
Across the EU, asylum applications reached a monthly total of 85,000 in May, a rate equivalent to more than one million per year. In that same month Germany received 22 per cent of the total, while Ireland received the highest per capita asylum application rate in the EU. In May, too, Italy’s application rate rose by a third over the previous year’s monthly rate. The EU’s Frontex agency has reported a decline in irregular entries.
But the issue has brought about political reaction in the form of the AfD surge in Germany and rumblings elsewhere, including threats by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to bus asylum seekers to Brussels. Germany has partially abrogated Schengen freedom of movement with member states by imposing border checks at its frontiers.
As I wrote here recently, the EU has nailed its asylum colours to the mast in the text of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms – and in the process nailed one foot, if not both feet, to the floor in relation to its capacity to stem the flow of economic migration posing as asylum-seeking. Would-be economic migrants into the EU have been accorded a fast lane into the member states, bypassing all more conventional immigration visa programmes and controls. This is because of the legal and constitutional-level protections now afforded by the EU asylum and international protection regime of rights and protections.
As I’ve already said, Ireland is experiencing the highest per capita rate of asylum-seeking in the EU. On top of an existing housing and homelessness crisis with a housing deficit of 300,000 homes, reduced rental opportunities and massive upward demand-led pressure on rents, Ireland is expected to cope with 25,000 or 30,000 asylum and international protection applicants each year. Every one of them arrives in Ireland by transiting through safe countries. That is simply not sustainable.
We are building tent towns in Ireland. But their legality and sustainability are already doubtful. We are now contemplating feeble measures including charging asylum seekers in employment €15 or €25 euro a week for non-tent emergency State accommodation. Even if carried into effect, such proposals are a pathetic, ineffectual response to the crisis.
No Irish Minister has even hinted that the Government is planning to build centres to detain asylum seekers pending adjudication of their claims, as is theoretically permissible under the much-vaunted EU migration pact. In the context of an open Irish-UK border and the Common Travel Area arrangements we enjoy with the UK, Ireland needs to tackle pull factors that are attracting asylum applicants to Ireland at the highest EU rate per capita. What are those factors? What do we do about them?
In retrospect, the Danes were very wise to opt out of most of the EU’s treaty provisions in relation to the area of freedom, justice and security. It is not that Danes are hard-hearted; it may be that they were simply hard-headed and could see around corners that were blind to other EU states. Ireland is heading into a winter in which these issues are going to be centre stage.