<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by NickP 1K:
Ireland seems to be one way or the other... as I've seen sometimes NO border control on flights from France or Germany.. then the next visit they are back. I'm not fully clear on the Irish governments virw on this.
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I'm sure Ireland would love to fully lower its borders to the other Schengen countries, but officially they are not allowed to do so because they have a decades-old agreement with the UK to permit passport-free movement between the two countries (particularly useful for travel to/from Northern Ireland). Due to the UK's paranoia regarding asylum seekers, Ireland is supposed to maintain stringent UK-style passport checks on all flights and ships to/from Schengen countries like France and Germany. In practice, I suspect that the checks are not implemented all the time.
The other confusing thing is that the UK and Ireland both have periodic bouts of "security checks", where on UK-Ireland flights you are asked for a form of ID, or otherwise asked to simply state your nationality. Of course, if the UK joined Schengen then this nonsense would be at an end, though I bet BAA (the operator of many British airports) would have a nightmare creating Schengen and non-Schengen zones at places like LHR
[This message has been edited by House (edited 09-17-2003).]
[This message has been edited by House (edited 09-17-2003).]