'Ridiculous' case Derry-based Filipino priest unable to make bus trip to Donegal raised

There are calls for a review of the Common Travel Area (CTA) after the case was raised of a Derry-based Filipino priest was unable to go on a bus trip to Donegal.

Stephen Kelly, the Derry-based Chief Executive of Manufacturing NI, raised the matter to the Dáil’s Good Friday Implementation Committee.

“Is it time to review the Common Travel Area that is reflective of the island of Ireland as it is today and indeed these two islands as we find them today?” he said.

“It seems ridiculous to me. There is a Filipino priest who serves in the local chapel in Derry.

"They were doing a bus trip into Donegal and the priest could not go. I wondered what was going on there. It is because of the migration issue post Brexit. He doesn’t have the rights so he didn’t take the risk.

“The same thing is happening on both sides of the border with school trips. It is a really important issue for people and individuals and what is says for us as a welcoming place.”

The CTA is an arrangement between Ireland and the UK that gives a variety of rights to citizens of those countries.

People who hold visas and have a right to live, work and study in the north and south of Ireland do not enjoy the rights Irish born citizens to untrammelled cross-border travel, however.

Mr Kelly pointed out that one large pharmaceutical company has a ‘3D jigsaw’ in order to ‘see which members staff can go to support work elsewhere on the island’.

He said: “The Common Travel Area was designed in the 1920s for an Ireland and a UK that doesn’t exist today.

“We are incredibly diverse countries and we have welcomed people who have enriched us with their own culture as well as their labour over the last number of decades. Those people don’t share in the same benefits as I do, someone who was born here.”