It’s not exactly breaking news at this stage for me to tell you that many of those who come to our home claiming asylum do so using fake documents. Others use real documents, which they dispose of before reaching immigration at the airport, or come over the northern border from the UK and go straight to the IPO centre on Mount Street, Dublin.
Writing about fake documents might be old hat at this stage, but I personally hadn’t heard of ‘look-alike’ documents before. That is, until I came across two such cases in short succession in the courts.
In short, a look-alike document, usually a passport in my experience, is a genuine photo ID document issued to a person, which is then ‘stolen’ (or perhaps sold)and ends up in the hands of criminal gangs who then match the passport with another person who looks like the owner.
The document can then be used to facilitate illegal border crossings.
It’s a bit like a much more sinister version of you borrowing your older sibling’s Garda Age Card to buy cans.
Recent cases before the courts shone a light on complexities that arise when refugee authorities and the Gardaí have to deal with people who use false documents to access state resources intended for those who are genuinely entitled to them.
The verification processes can be arduous, and even when the fakery is exposed, the system doesn’t allow for the swift removal from the state of the offender/s.
Two Somali men, one who claimed asylum in Sweden and one a refugee in Ireland, were caught using such passports to smuggle other Somalis into Ireland.
One of the men used a look-alike passport to smuggle a woman he said was his wife, who later claimed that she was his late wife’s sister and his new wife, who later admitted that she was his sister.
He also used fake documents to gain genuine family reunification documents from Irish authorities, which were used to smuggle his son and sister into Ireland. Once they got here, they claimed asylum and have now been granted subsidiary protection. He was jailed for one year.
His sister, on the other hand, wasn’t prosecuted and was referred to as the ‘injured party’ in the case. It’s pretty obvious that she knew the passport used to bring her to Ireland wasn’t hers, and yet our system had rewarded her for her wrongdoing. It’s important to note that the Garda detective who gave evidence in the case expressed that she wasn’t satisfied that the name the sister gave was even genuine. This sounds like a bit of a minefield.
Another Somali man, Ahmed Ali Adow (39), who has an address in Sweden, used the same scheme to smuggle a man and a woman into Ireland using a Belgian passport belonging to a male and an Irish passport, an Irish medical card, an Irish residency permit, and a Revolut card belonging to a female.
You don’t have to be a genius to guess that the state has not an iota who these people actually are. In fact l, when told that the man who smuggled his ‘sister/wife’ into Ireland was “injured by Al Shabaab”, Judge Sinéad Ní Chúlacháin said, in a rather emphatic manner, that she didn’t know “what side” he was on.
How could she? A person comes to Ireland claiming to have been targeted by an Islamic terror group, but as the judge helpfully brings it to light, the State has almost no solid way of knowing if that’s even true or what role that person played.
It’s highly doubtful that this is a unique scenario.
The Somali asylum seeker who is accused of the murder of Ukrainian teen refugee Vadym Davidenko himself claimed that his age verification documents were “not real”. Those are the very documents that would have been used to house him in a special facility for juveniles.
The dogs on the street know that Somalia, for one, is “close to a lawless state” according to a senior counsel, yet our state, which for all its flaws is not lawless, is facilitating a system where anyone – even someone who has broken our immigration laws- can rock up, say the word asylum, and has to be processed at the taxpayer’s expense.