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A priest from Derry was unable to go on a bus trip to Donegal with parishioners due to stringent visa rules for non-UK and non-Irish citizens, an Oireachtas committee has been told.

Stephen Kelly, the Derry-based Chief Executive of Manufacturing NI, raised the ‘ridiculous’ incident and called for a review of the Common Travel Area (CTA).

He said people who have made their homes in Ireland and have ‘enriched us with their own culture as well as their labour in recent decades’ do not ‘share the same rights and benefits under the CTA as I do as someone born here’.

"It seems ridiculous to me. My wife is a daily communicant who goes to Mass every morning. There is a Filipino priest who serves in the local chapel in Derry.

Stephen Kelly, the Derry-based Chief Executive of Manufacturing NI, has raised the ‘ridiculous’ case of a Derry priest who couldn't go on a bus run to Donegal and called for a review of the Common Travel Area (CTA).

"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 does not have the right to go and therefore did not take the risk. The same thing is happening on both sides of the Border relating to schoolchildren on school trips. I know it sounds like nonsense and is not the biggest economic issue in the world.

‘The problem is that the border isn’t open to everyone who lives here’

"However, it is a really important issue for individuals and what it says about this being an open welcoming place for people to come and make a contribution to civic and economic life,” said the Derry lobbyist.

Under the CTA people living on both sides of the border 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.

Mr. Kelly asked members of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement last week if it was time to review the CTA to make it ‘more reflective of the island of Ireland as it is today and indeed these two islands as we find them today’.

"Maybe now is the time to try to find the original document, dust it off and make it fit for purpose for the island we have now North and South and for the UK as it stands,” he said.

Common Travel Area review call after ‘ridiculous’ case of Derry priest who couldn’t go on Donegal bus run

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