Chris Gray
speaker
586 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Jun
Chris Gray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
last night and and the language that you know you've chosen to use to describe the scale of what of what we've seen and then what that says about your fellow citizens and what that says in terms of how people feel about about their city is it's really is really quite something when we see those images when we see the at least the motivation of of some of those involved
How much, Kieran, has there been a conversation, a national conversation, a political conversation in Northern Ireland in recent years about the scale, significant or otherwise, of demographic change, of migrants from...
beyond Northern Ireland, beyond the island of Ireland, beyond the UK, perhaps beyond Europe, coming to Northern Ireland and the extent to which there's been a conversation, a debate, any sense of anger about whether or not that's been in any sense too much or unmanageable.
Yeah, and there's two thoughts, I think, that spring out from all of this, one of which, as you, Kieran, were just mentioning there, is a strand of conversation we spend inordinate amounts of time talking about in the context of the Brexit debates, and then the other, if you like, sits in the context of the wider UK debate about migration and asylum-seeking, which so often has as its visual backdrop
small boats and the English Channel.
And of course, the UK has a land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
And courtesy of the Good Friday Agreement and all of those conversations that followed around the Brexit debates, that is a border that...
to all intents and purposes, is, you know, you can cross without barely noticing you've crossed it.
Clearly the roadsides change, et cetera, et cetera.
But it isn't an international frontier of the type that you might imagine for all the reasons we spent eons discussing on Brexitcast.
So it raises questions and it has raised questions.
There's loads and loads of questions to the prime minister's team and the Downing Street team after prime minister's questions at lunchtime today.
around what's known as the common travel area, the capacity for people to travel between the Republic and the UK very easily, including from the Republic to the UK whilst you are still on the island of Ireland.
In other words, driving, or in the case of this particular incident, getting on a bus and going from Dublin to London.
to Belfast and certainly the government is making it clear as we record having encountered a shed load of questions at lunchtime and not really offered much of an answer to many of them of what they're doing around immigration enforcement in particular in Northern Ireland in fact as I speak to you I'm still reading this note so I'll have a proper read of it.
Fill you in in a couple of minutes.
But in essence, there is clearly right now a lot of scrutiny coming in the direction of the government in London around a border that is very easy to cross.
And on exactly that point, just picking through what the Fokin government here in London are saying around the questions that they're facing around the common travel area and the nature of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
So they are saying the number of asylum seekers in supported accommodation in Northern Ireland has decreased by 6% under this government from 2,500 to
in June of 2024 to 2,300 in March of this year.
Showing 241–260 of 586 · page 13 of 30
← Previous
Next →