Ireland’s evolving migration policies: building alliances and a liberal European identity through the EU migration policy crisis

Abstract

Although Ireland’s migration policy has converged towards EU norms, it has overall been more influenced by the UK, and maintaining the common travel area, and by domestic politics, than by Europeanisation. Since migration is not highly salient or contentious in Ireland, the Irish government was free in 2015 to participate in the EU response to the migration policy crisis. Ireland opted in to relocate asylum seekers from Greece and Italy, and to resettle refugees from Lebanon, to provide personnel to the European Asylum Support Office and to dispatch the defence forces to participate in Operation Sophia in the Mediterranean. This practical expression of solidarity with those Member States with an external border also served to garner solidarity from the EU in the era of Brexit, and to reinforce a particular European identity for Ireland based on liberalism and cosmopolitanism, in the era of ‘illiberal democracy’ from certain quarters of the EU.