Police Cooperation across the Irish Border: Familiarity Breeding Contempt for Transparency and Accountability

Walsh, Dermot P. J.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-6478.2011.00544.x

“…Quinn by a criminal gang south of the border in 2007. An Garda Siochána (Irish Police) and Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officers operated as a team with Gardai conducting door-to-door enquiries in Northern Ireland (accompanied by PSNI personnel) while PSNI officers attended the interviews of suspects and witnesses in Ireland (Walsh, 2011). Another example of organic cross-border cooperation involving police officers was the prolonged search in 2016 for the body of a young man believed to have drowned in the river Erne which traverses the Irish border.…”

Section: One Example Of This Cooperation Is the Cross-border Investigation Into The Murder Of Paulmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brexit, Bordering and Bodies on the Island of Ireland

McCall¹

2020

Beyond the Good Friday Agreement

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The Brexit campaign to withdraw the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) was driven primarily by opposition to immigration and the freedom of movement of EU workers to Britain. Consequently, a central focus of Brexit was the perceived need for bordering, that is, the strengthening of Britain's borders as security barriers to prevent the movement of these unwanted outsiders to Britain. Such bordering has the potential to turn the tide against decades of debordering on the island of Ireland that was delivered by Europeanisation, the North South provisions of the Good Friday Agreement, and a wealth of cross-border cooperation initiatives. From an open Irish border vantage point this paper explores three Brexit bordering options: bordering the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; bordering Britain; and bordering the isles of Britain and Ireland. The argument is that the least costly one is to confine Brexit bordering to the island of Great Britain.

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“…Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officers operated as a team with Gardai conducting door-to-door enquiries in Northern Ireland (accompanied by PSNI personnel) while PSNI officers attended the interviews of suspects and witnesses in Ireland (Walsh, 2011). Another example of organic cross-border cooperation involving police officers was the prolonged search in 2016 for the body of a young man believed to have drowned in the river Erne which traverses the Irish border.…”

Section: One Example Of This Cooperation Is the Cross-border Investigmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brexit, Bordering and Bodies on the Island of Ireland

McCall

¹

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Brexit campaign to withdraw the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) was driven primarily by opposition to immigration and the freedom of movement of EU workers to Britain. Consequently, a central focus of Brexit was the perceived need for bordering, that is, the strengthening of Britain's borders as security barriers to prevent the movement of these unwanted outsiders to Britain. Such bordering has the potential to turn the tide against decades of debordering on the island of Ireland that was delivered by Europeanisation, the North South provisions of the Good Friday Agreement, and a wealth of cross-border cooperation initiatives. From an open Irish border vantage point this paper explores three Brexit bordering options: bordering the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; bordering Britain; and bordering the isles of Britain and Ireland. The argument is that the least costly one is to confine Brexit bordering to the island of Great Britain.

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“…Walsh (2011), in his empirical study on the Irish-UK border, spoke of a "mismatch" between meso-and macro-level regulation, and informal and micro-level practices on the ground. Recognising the co-existence of formal and informal cooperation, legal scholars have pointed out a certain lack of transparency and accountability -and indeed legitimacy -of the latter (Hufnagel 2011;Walsh 2011). Hufnagel (2016) however also made the call not to legally harmonise too much, in order to keep differences and enthusiasm alive.…”

Section: 'Particularities' Of Cbpcmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Linguistic competencies cannot be taken for granted and are often absent. The "common history" may indeed also be a conflicting history (Darley 2008;Schwell 2017;Walsh 2011). Sheptycki (2001, p.135) in writing on "organisational dilemmas and operational solutions for policing the internal borders of Europe" made a similar point as the editors, by remarking that the complexities of police cooperation in transfrontier settings that arise from linguistic differences pale in insignificance beside those that stem from the fragmented legal terrain on which the transnational practices of police agencies are built.…”

Section: Empirical Insightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Policing-Mobilities in the Border-Stripe

Weissensteiner¹

1

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The establishment of an area of "freedom of movement" without border control within the Schengen-area is deemed one of the major achievements of European integration. However, developments since 2015 have shown a renewed salience of internal borders. This is due, on the one hand, to the introduction and maintenance of temporary border control by several member states, which was justified as a response to unauthorised mobilities problematised as "secondary movements". On the other hand, also border-regions adjacent to internal borders have acquired an increased strategic importance. Particularly the European Commission advanced the recommendation to shift towards enhanced (national) border-area police-checks and police cooperation as an alternative to border control. Both the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and explicitly the Convention Implementing the Schengen Agreement (CISA) encourage bilateral police cooperation between member states, foreseeing particular measures for countries that share a common border. Various studies conducted in the 1990s engaged with initially informal, and increasingly formalised, forms of cooperation across borderregions. In current times, practices of cross-border police cooperation as well as of migration policing at internal borders constitute a substantial knowledge gap.In this dissertation I examine the intersection of cross-border police cooperation (CBPC) with the control of differential mobility rights within today's EU Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. I conceptualise and analyse CBPC as policing-mobilities in the border-strip. Grounded in empirical fieldwork with police officers, this study fills important research-gaps that persist with regards to a twofold inquiry: a) police cooperation at the scale of border-regions and b) the policing of mobilities at internal Schengen borders. Specifically, this study concentrates on three CBPC instruments: joint police centres or PCCCs, (joint) border-area patrols and bilateral simplified fasttrack readmissions. Some of these were also amongst the "best practices" and alternatives which since 2017 the Commission has recommended to enhance. Beyond findings of analytical relevance, this study allows one to critically engage with the envisaged border-area 'solutions'.In PART I, I place this dissertation at the crossroad of social-science and law within a multidisciplinary field of scholarly engagement. I outline the theoretical framework and methodological approach of a multisited research design. Rather than conducting a research that favours a focus on discourses and laws or on situated practices, I studied both elements and the interdependence between law-as-text and as-practice, aiming to get a grasp of large-scale processes not reducible to one empirical field-locale. In PART II, I draw attention towards the spatial-legal regimes that regulate CBPC and trace their emergence as institutionalised regimes of practices. I argue that they constitute the border-strip as spatial-legal condition of possibility xv...

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Police Cooperation across the Irish Border: Familiarity Breeding Contempt for Transparency and Accountability

Cited by 5 publications

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Brexit, Bordering and Bodies on the Island of Ireland

Brexit, Bordering and Bodies on the Island of Ireland

Brexit, Bordering and Bodies on the Island of Ireland

Policing-Mobilities in the Border-Stripe

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