Up to 90% of asylum seekers in Ireland may have entered the country via the Northern Ireland land border in the last three years, figures suggest.
Irish government data shows the common travel area (CTA) is being exploited in both directions but suggests it may be more popular for those seeking asylum in Ireland than in the UK.
The UK Home Office revealed overnight that in the past year it had apprehended more than 900 “immigration offenders” abusing the open land border.
Data from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in Dublin, however, showed 16,600 people had sought asylum at an airport or port. Significant numbers in that cohort were thought to have travelled from Great Britain to Ireland via a flight or ferry to Belfast.
The CTA has come under renewed scrutiny this week after a knife attack in Belfast on Monday. The suspect, Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese refugee, has been charged with attempted murder.
The attack triggered two nights of violence after it emerged Alodid had travelled from Sudan to Paris and then Dublin before taking a bus to Belfast where he claimed asylum in 2023. Police reinforcements were sent from Great Britain to Northern Ireland on Thursday.
Before 2019, the number of people seeking asylum in Ireland was relatively small, about 5,000, commensurate with the experience of a small country on the farthest outreaches of Europe.
That number grew significantly between 2022 and 2024, when it peaked at 18,500. Just 10% of people applied for asylum at an airport or port, while 90% made a first-time application in person at the International Protection Office in Dublin.
In 2025 and 2026 to date, the proportion of asylum seekers applying at the office in person were 88% and 90% respectively.
Without physical checks on the Irish border, neither the UK nor Irish governments can verify the precise numbers of people crossing the border illegally, but in 2024 Ireland’s then justice minister, Helen McEntee, said publicly that 80% were coming over the land border.
Last year, DFAT said: “The department’s assessment, based on the experience of staff and others working in the field, and based on the material gathered at interviews, is that in a significant proportion of cases, those applying for the first time for international protection have entered over the land border.”
The Irish government said on Thursday it shared the “deep concern” over the violence in Belfast and was working closely with the British government over CTA abuses.
It was also expecting to revive a post-Brexit returns agreement that has so far seen only one asylum seeker returned to Ireland from the UK.
The deal agreed in 2020 was delayed after Ireland’s high court ruled that the UK’s policy on sending asylum seekers to Rwanda meant it was not a legally defined “safe country”.
“Arrangements for re-operationalising the agreement, on foot of the redesignation of the UK as a safe third country, will be put in place in consultation with the UK,” DFAT said.
The Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, spoke to Ireland’s justice minister, Jim O’Callaghan, on Wednesday and McEntee, who is now the foreign minister, on Tuesday. The Irish ministers were also in touch with their Stormont counterparts to ensure all sides continued to coordinate a response.
A call between Benn, O’Callaghan and Northern Ireland’s justice minister, Naomi Long, discussed “the importance of cross border cooperation in protecting the CTA for both Ireland and the UK”.
Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, said there were “questions to be asked” about immigration policy across the two islands and about the checks taking place in Dublin.
Critics have called the CTA a “back door to Britain”, and the Democratic Unionist leader, Gavin Robinson, has called for the border to be closed.
Katy Hayward, a professor of political sociology at Queen’s University Belfast, said any issue relatiing to borders and border controls were bound to be contentious in Northern Ireland. But, she added: “It has taken on a particular and dangerous intensity post-Brexit. Unionist political leaders face the challenge of wanting to show empathy with that furious sentiment at the same time as working with and in the institutions that have to try to manage it.”
Ireland’s taoiseach, Micheál Martin, said on Thursday the CTA was positive for Irish and British people but that it constantly needed to be managed as people would “endeavour to abuse it”.