The Origins of the Common Travel Area between Ireland and the United Kingdom and its Fate in an Era of Governmental Concern about Undocumented Migration and International Terrorism. ESRI WP418. December 2011

Abstract

In the late 1990s I chose the Common Travel Area (CTA) as the topic of a research paper I did as a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. This was in the wake of opt‐outs by the Irish and British governments from the incorporation of the Schengen Agreement on the free movement of persons into the Treaty of Amsterdam. My intention was to explore the conditions under which an Irish government might see its interests as lying with EU freedom of movement rather than in the continuation of the CTA with the United Kingdom (UK). I was also interested in the associated political and socio‐economic rights that made the CTA more of a mini‐EU than simply an area of free movement – primarily, voting rights and rights of residence, employment, and access to social benefits and services. But, as this paper concludes, it is important also to remember that the CTA is an agreement about immigration into both states as well as free movement between them