THE PLANE BELIEVED to have carried eight illegally deported people from the United States earlier this week has returned to Shannon Airport this morning.

On Thursday, Tánaiste Simon Harris, who is also the minister for foreign affairs, said his department was investigating whether the flight carrying the eight people to East Africa had stopped at the airport.

Gardaí in Shannon told The Journal on Thursday that the flight is believed to have been a deportation flight that stopped in Ireland.

The New York Times reported this week that the flight’s departure from the US had violated a court order. 

The eight people believed to have been carried on the flight are now being held in Djibouti, with their ultimate destination being South Sudan. 

The Gulfstream V aircraft, which is registered in the US, appears to have left Egypt this morning, flown across the Mediterranean and the European continent, and landed in Shannon at around 8:45am today. 

It is routine that US flights land at Shannon to refuel. Some are military while most, including the Gulfstream GV, are operated by civilian charter companies. 

The plane has since departed Shannon Airport.

Labour leader Ivana Bacik, who raised the issue of the initial flight in the Dáil this week, told The Journal:

“If the flight has indeed landed back at Shannon this morning, then I am very concerned that this could represent Ireland’s continued complicity in the aggressive and illegal migration policies being pursued by the Trump administration”.

“I would also be concerned that we are continuing to allow planes to refuel at Shannon or fly through Irish airspace en route to deliver weapons of genocide to Israel.

She again called on Transport Minister Darragh O’Brien to provide “clarity on what exactly is going on at Shannon”.

With reporting from Niall O’Connor and Conor O’Carroll