An investigation reveals how the absence of border checks between Ireland and the UK allows asylum seekers and migrants to cross into Northern Ireland with ease, often using coach services. The situation has sparked political tensions and raised security concerns following a recent knife attack in Belfast.
For more than five years, Carl has been driving his 60-seater coach from Dublin to Belfast. It's a two-hour journey straight up the M1 and across the border - and Carl knows his customers.
At least, he thought he did. Because one morning last summer, Carl saw something that made him realise his job had changed completely. As he loaded suitcases into the undercarriage, he spotted a man standing beside his bus holding a wad of cash in his right hand.
Dressed in jeans and a dark puffer jacket, the man - who didn't appear to be local - was constantly looking over his shoulder, almost as though he knew what he was doing would attract unwanted attention.
'At first I was unsure what he was doing,' Carl - not his real name - confessed to the Daily Mail outside Dublin's central bus station when we spoke to him earlier this year. 'But then I saw he was handing 20 euro bills to a line of men - none of whom spoke English - and who were each using the money to buy a ticket and climb aboard my coach.
' It was only when he saw this happening a second time that Carl realised he was not only driving commuters and tourists over the border into the UK, but dozens of asylum seekers. Hundreds if not thousands of migrants are now believed to have made the journey from the Republic to Northern Ireland by bus in recent years.
And we now know that one of them is the Sudanese man who has now been charged with attempted murder over the alleged knife attack on a man in his 40s in Belfast on Monday night. The suspect, Hadi Alodid, is believed to have travelled from the African country to Paris and then to Dublin, before crossing the Northern Irish border by bus.
He passed through at least two safe countries, France and Ireland, before claiming asylum once on UK soil - and he arrived in Europe two months before Sudan's civil war began in April 2023. This individual was given leave to remain by the Home Office in September 2023.
Fred Kelly gets off the coach in Belfast, having completed his journey from Dublin with no checks Belfast has seen widespread protests this week following the knife attack on a man in the north of the city on Monday 'I voted for Brexit,' Carl told us when we met him earlier this year, 'and I've always said I'm British, not Irish. But in Northern Ireland, we didn't get Brexit: we have an open border with Europe for the flow of undocumented people.
It's as simple as that. For the first time in my life, we've got Nationalists and Loyalists uniting in the face of a common enemy.
' In words that now seem prescient, he added: 'I tell you, boy, there's trouble brewing. ' Known as the Common Travel Area (CTA), the border agreement between Ireland and the UK allows British and Irish citizens to move freely, with limited checks, between the two countries. Although the same privileges are not extended to foreign nationals, the absence of a physical border has allowed asylum seekers to cross into the UK with ease.
But what's all the more astonishing is that, as the Daily Mail has discovered, many of the male migrants who crossed from Dublin to Belfast earlier this year were typically not recent arrivals to Ireland, but had rather come to the UK through various means months if not years earlier. They had then fled to the Republic of Ireland after the Tories announced the Rwanda deportation scheme, only to then head back to the UK after Labour scrapped the policy upon winning the general election in July 2024.
In short, an 'invisible border' - once a major sticking point in Brexit negotiations - has become a free pass into the UK. In February this year, the Daily Mail boarded one of the more than 50 coaches that leave Dublin for Belfast every day, taking the 100-mile journey north, for just 20 euros.
Clambering up the steps, a young Croatian couple produced their passports for the driver's approval, only for him to wave them away with a nonchalant: 'You don't need those!
' 'We assumed that, as we are from Europe and we are entering the UK now, we would show our passports,' the couple - in their thirties - told me. 'But the driver just said no.' Eighty minutes later, we passed without fanfare or any checks into Northern Ireland. Half an hour after that, we arrived in Belfast where passengers disembarked without checks or customs, and dispersed into the city.
'I wouldn't know who was carrying a passport and who wasn't,' confessed the driver, who again didn't wish to be named for fear of professional repercussions. 'The bottom line is, you're supposed to be British or Irish but we have no border and so you can imagine what might happen. In the past year, my bus has been stopped once by the PSNI , and that was in the middle of the night when no one was on board anyway.
' Reports of buses being stopped for immigration checks are exceedingly rare, with drivers reporting anything from zero to four times in the past yea
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