From Irish Political Review, June 2004 Citizenship Referendum by Angela Clifford The Referendum on Citizenship will be passed as a confidence trick. It will not reduce the number of immigrants/asylum-seekers living in Ireland, though it is widely believed that it will do so and it is likely to be carried on that basis. It will bring race into the definition of Irish nationality in the Constitution.
The object of the Referendum is to remove the existing automatic right of citizenship of all people born on the island of Ireland, whatever the land of origin of their parents. It will be replaced by a highly conditional and uncertain provision which gives an Irish Minister of Justice the effective right to determine what children born in Ireland of foreign nationals will be Irish. This is because, under the new legislation, one of the parents of a child born in Ireland must have obtained a Certificate of authorised residence from the Minister of Justice and must have held such a Certificate for three years prior to the birth. The parents may have lived in Ireland for twenty years, and the child may have been born and reared in Ireland but—without such a Certificate—it will not be Irish. Presumably the Minister of Justice will not issue such Certificates to people in the Northern jurisdiction, which means that in future no children born to 'foreigners' in Northern Ireland will be able to claim Irish citizenship.
The Referendum will not reduce the numbers of foreigners living in Ireland. First there are huge numbers living in and working in Ireland legally. Second, there are asylum-seekers who have sought refuge in Ireland for political and economic reasons. And then there are illegal immigrants. None of these groups will be diminished in numbers by the Referendum.
The public does not appreciate that Irish law has already been changed to prevent families from availing of the birth of a child in Ireland to settle the whole family in the country—and, by extension, in the EU. All that Michael McDowell's referendum does is to prevent a child with foreign parents from making use of Irish citizenship, gained by birth on the island of Ireland, to go to live in the EU in 18 years' time when it comes of age.
It is open to other European countries to make the same legal change as has already been made in Ireland: to prevent the families of baby-citizens from claiming residence rights. Such a change would take care of cases like that of the Chen Family, currently before the Northern Ireland Courts, whereby the family of an Irish-born baby is claiming the right to reside in the EU. That is of no concern within Ireland, of course, because that possibility has already been excluded within the 26 Counties by legislation which has survived Supreme Court challenge.
However, many people suspect that the Irish Government is closing the 'Chen loophole' to please the British and other European Governments, rather than in the interests of good government at home. If that is so, Taoiseach Ahern and Justice Minister McDowell are not acting out of pure altruism, as Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats hope to capitalise on anti-foreign sentiment in Ireland and to embarrass the Opposition in the June elections with an appeal to electoral prejudice.
It might also be remarked that the numbers of foreigners affected by this provision is small: it is estimated that something like 450 'citizenship-babies' were born on the whole island in 2003—a drop in the ocean of foreign workers/asylum-seekers who have come just to the southern part in search of the good life.
And why shouldn't they? Ireland is the most globalised country in the world, in the sense that its financial and production structures have been geared to the needs of foreign, rather than native, markets. Economically Ireland has become part of the neo-Imperial world—and the price of sitting at the top table is that it must play host to foreign labour seeking to pick up a few crumbs. After all, labour must follow capital. A couple of years ago Mary Harney as Minister for Commerce felt obliged to scour the world looking for workers to entice to Ireland. Bertie Ahern went to Peking to get Chinese students, who naturally want to be self-supporting once they are in Ireland. And a benign attitude was taken to workers from Eastern Europe seeking work in Ireland.
But that all created a back-lash, for the laissez-faire mentality inherited from Britain means that the State has not adopted the pro-active approach which could minimise the disruption of ordinary people's lives by the influx of people from very different cultures, who themselves have been released from social constraints by transplantation to an environment where they are not known, where they are not part of a community. There is also the fact that the artificial ballooning of the workforce has kept Irish wages down and put pressure on scarce social resources. It is not surprising that there is a resentment at the facilities provided for people regarded as asylum-tourists by people themselves living in constrained circumstances, who feel their communities threatened by strange lifestyles or personally at risk from increased criminality.
Of the Opposition parties, Sinn Fein has been the only one to act in a principled manner on the issue. It has not run scared, but acted as a potential party of government. Much to the chagrin of the West Britons, it is their own political friends who are pandering to racism, while the so-called 'fascists' in the republican movement are educating their support-base and espousing multi-cultural attitudes. They are able to do this because they haven't dumped the Irish national world-view: they are in a position to promote a context for immigrants to adapt to.
The strange thing is that those promoting this Referendum are often the same people who have argued that Irish birth is what should determine the 'Irishness' of such authors as Elizabeth Bowen and Iris Murdoch. A neat letter in the newspaper polemic on the matter (which features in this magazine) suggested that, in view of this belief, Martin Mansergh will presumably be campaigning for a 'No' vote. In fact, he is campaigning for a Yes.
The issue is further confused by a proposal from John Hume that a 'Certificate of Irishness' should be made available to everyone around the world claiming Irish extraction: a document that presumably will confer no actual rights! (Irish Times 10.5.04.) In view of the fact that the simple principle which has heretofore operated—that everyone born in Ireland is entitled to Irish citizenship and all its rights—is now made conditional, his suggestion of giving people a bit of worthless paper is particularly inane.
Fine Gael has associated itself with the governing parties on the issue. And Labour Leader Pat Rabbitte would have effectively liked to place Labour in the anti-foreigner camp. By all reports he was only prevented from doing so by a determined group led by Michael D. Higgins and Ivana Bacik. The former Stickie seems to think that the way to win power is to follow the consensus set by an anti-national, anti-Sinn Fein, pro-British media, court electoral prejudice, and tailor Labour policy to the 'Consumer', meaning the aspirant middle classes. It is a sad end for Connolly's party. As a result Labour opposition to the Referendum is minimal and ineffective.
Finally there is the matter of the Belfast Agreement. If it were not already fatally compromised, this Referendum would jeopardise its credibility. I view that Agreement as theoretically having the status of constitutional law enacted by two referendums and functional in two jurisdictions. That law is now to be unilaterally changed by a Referendum in one jurisdiction, Southern Ireland, even though that change will affect both jurisdictions. The June vote in the Southern jurisdiction will have a bearing on the Chen Case—a Northern and British matter.
Altering the Belfast Agreement without a second referendum in Northern Ireland makes nonsense of it as a fixed template for political action: it officially reduces its status to that of an arbitrary arrangement, changeable to suit momentary convenience. That is why Dr. Paisley has been so gleeful at the Southern referendum. And that is also the reason SDLP leader Mark Durkan, who himself has a legal background, has done his utmost to first prevent the Referendum and then to counsel rejection. The Human Rights Commissions under the Agreement, North and South, have also advised postponement of the Referendum to no avail. Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats prefer opportunist pandering to popular prejudice. Their policies of encouraging foreign workers to come to Ireland helped cause the problem and now they seek to ride the racist wave they generated. They are despicable.
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