Ireland for the Irish

"It is rare in politics for policies to have such an immediate effect that one can justifiably say: ‘See? Told you.’ But that is what has happened with the Rwanda stuff. Those who have argued that sending illegal asylum seekers to Rwanda is not a deterrent no longer have a leg to stand on. It is all the more piquant, of course, because the Irish have been clamouring for an open border with Northern Ireland since late June 2016 – so here it is, fill your boots.

Better still, the Irish courts recently decided that the UK is not a safe country to which asylum seekers might be dispatched, on the grounds that we will send them to Africa. So the Irish have been stitched up like a kipper by that most magnificent of things, reality.

In truth, they should be glad: all those migrants will now have a safe and welcoming place to live, rather than being subjected to the famous historic brutality of the Bruddish – that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? In all your rhetoric? Because the migrant crisis hardly impinged at all. It’s one thing bobbing about in a dinghy across 20 miles of the English Channel – the Irish Sea is a whole other caboodle.

If I were the British home secretary I think I’d open a new refugee-processing centre in somewhere like Crossmaglen, with very clear directions to the border, or possibly a shuttle bus. Suddenly, from the Republic, the virtue-signalling has fallen rather quiet and been replaced by xenophobia – towards us and the migrants. But then it is always difficult to grandstand if you are in a peat bog, metaphorically of course. You just sink under the weight of your own stupid hubris. This is an uppance which has been a long time coming and has provided the rest of us, over here, with copious amounts of craic."