Is Northern Ireland caught in the middle of a dispute between the governments in Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland regarding the movement of migrants without any real agency or influence?

It's a huge issue at the moment and it's what we're discussing on this edition of Red Lines.

And joining me to shed some light on what is a remarkably wide-ranging subject are Elaine Loughlin, the Irish Examiner's political editor,

Harry McGee, political correspondent at the Irish Times, the Belfast solicitor, Shnade Marmion,

who specialises in immigration and asylum law, and our former political editor, Mark Devonport.

Welcome to you all. Thank you for joining me today.

Mark, first of all,

let's just do a quick explainer for the benefit of listeners who perhaps don't have the detailed

knowledge of the issue that others might have because it has so many elements to it. A lot of

different elements to it. And of course, migration has been a huge issue for countries across Western Europe and North America as well,

as we see climate change and war across the world driving the movement of people from those areas

where they've been hard hit through a mixture of poverty, as I say, climate change and conflict

to try to seek refuge in richer countries

and where increasingly there's now been a bit of a backlash, which has taken in Britain and

Ireland with the movement of migrants, particularly across the English Channel. Most recently,

of course, we saw just in April the Irish Justice Minister, Helen McEntee,

coming up with this guesstimate that 80% of the asylum seekers who were looking for protection

in the Irish Republic were coming across the Northern Ireland border. And that was, to some

extent, welcomed by the Prime Minister

Rishi Sunak because it was linked with his Rwanda policy and he was going into a local election

and he was saying, well, you know, if this is a sign that people are getting out of the UK,

it shows that my policy is beginning to work. What we've then seen this month is yet another development here with this court case, where

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