The Supreme Court ruling has left us with a very strange set of contradictions about Irish citizenship, writes Fintan O'Toole
IN 1991, at a lunch in the Shelbourne Hotel, the then taoiseach, Charles Haughey, handed 11 Irish passports to a number of Arab gentlemen. Eight were for Sheikh Khaled al Mahfouz, a Saudi banker subsequently alleged to have connections to Osama bin Laden, and his family. The other three were for Pakistani nationals. With the passports, the taoiseach handed over naturalisation application forms - a rather pathetic gesture towards formality given that Irish citizenship was being conferred on these people before they had even applied for it.
This was just the most spectacular episode in a long-running scheme under which Irish citizenship was effectively sold in return for investment in Irish companies. Irish passports apparently were also given to friendly governments for use in covert activities. We know, for example, that the top secret US government delegation that travelled to Iran at the start of the extraordinary Iran-Contra scandal carried Irish passports. Becoming an Irish citizen, in other words, has often been remarkably easy - if you're rich and powerful.
Or if you are white. Ireland takes a very generous view of who qualifies to be a citizen. There has been a recognition, especially in recent years, that being Irish is not a simple business. Because of the almost uniquely high proportion of the island's population that has emigrated over the last 250 years, we've had to recognise that Ireland and the Irish don't always go together. Besides, as the late Spike Milligan claimed he was told when he chose to be become an Irish citizen, we needed the people.
Many people around the world regard themselves as Irish in some sense, even though they were not born here. In response, the State has been remarkably flexible in the granting of citizenship. Being born here is just one of six ways a person can become an Irish citizen. Marrying a citizen and being naturalised after a period of residency are two of the others.
But the remaining three have to do, quite simply, with an underlying notion about race and ethnicity. They qualify under what is technically called jus sanguinis - the law of blood.
Thus the child of an Irish citizen born in, say, London, is entitled to Irish citizenship. This person's child is also entitled to an Irish passport. If you were born in Boston and both your parents were born in the US but your granny came from Killarney, all you have to do is go to the Irish embassy or any consular office, and put your name on the so-called Foreign Births Register. The embassy will give you a certificate which in turn entitles you to an Irish passport.
Our official definition of Irishness is even more elastic than this, however. In some circumstances, having just one Irish great-grandparent entitles you to an Irish passport.
Our official definition of Irishness is generous in another respect, too. Unlike many other countries, Ireland doesn't see citizenship as a form of monogamy. You can be an Irish citizen and, at the same time, hold a second passport. Again, because of our history of emigration, we understand the notion that people may have genuine allegiances to more than one state.
All of this, moreover, was apparently copperfastened by the Belfast Agreement. Having seen in the Northern Ireland conflict the price to be paid for exclusive and inflexible ideas of national identity, we enthusiastically signed up to a treaty that quite explicitly accepts that nationality is both a matter of choice and potentially multiple. People born in Northern Ireland have a right to be "Irish or British or both as they may so choose". These radical, generous and open notions of citizenship and nationality might suggest an unusually sophisticated approach to issues that too often lend themselves to rigidity and intolerance. They imply that the word "we", is in our lexicon, an elastic and inclusive term.
The problem, however, is that underlying them all is an unspoken, perhaps not even conscious, assumption: that "we" are white, English-speaking people. Faced with the tangible possibility that this assumption might have to be re-examined, the official response, in this week's Supreme Court judgment on the rights of the non-national parents of Irish-born children, is that Irishness is not such a flexible idea after all.
The questions the Supreme Court judges faced were complex, and so are the individual rulings. The judges certainly did not produce a charter for mass deportations. They made it clear, moreover, that the application of asylum and immigration policies must still be governed by a genuine consideration of every individual case. They have left the responsibility for exercising compassion and decency in the hands of the politicians who will continue to run the system.
Yet they have created a very strange set of contradictions. On the one hand, we still have citizenship laws that place a very heavy emphasis on the ties of blood. If you grew up in Melbourne or Manchester or Mississippi, and your archival researches reveal that your great-grandfather left Kiltimagh at the age of six months, you can be a citizen. You acquire your Irish citizenship from sharing blood with an Irish person.
On the other hand, if you are born in Dublin but your parents grew up in Lagos or Bucharest or Kabul, they don't have any right to be Irish. They don't acquire citizenship by sharing blood with an Irish person.
Yet surely, if blood and biology are the criteria, the parent of a child born in the Rotunda Hospital has closer ties than the great-grandchild of someone born in Ireland. In the first case, the link stretches over one generation. In the second, it has to pass through three generations.
It may be, of course, that biological definitions of nationality are always inherently absurd. But these particular absurdities are consciously created. They are a matter of man-made law.
And as that law now stands, it has a dangerous edge of racism. For what it says, in effect, is that Irish citizenship can pass from one generation to another in the Anglo-Saxon world, but not in those foreign countries that we see as somehow not part of "us".
There is another layer of strangeness, too. We now have a situation where, by virtue of EU residency rights, someone from, say, Greece or Sweden, or any other part of a massively expanding EU, can not merely come to live in Ireland, but can bring their parents, their grandparents and, if they are fortunate enough to have any still alive, their great-grandparents. But some Irish citizens - those born here of non-national parents - can't even bring their mothers and fathers to live here.
How do we explain this inconsistency and incoherence? It would be nice to think that there is some innocent, rational set of principles at work. Until someone can discover what they are, though, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the true criterion for sorting one category of citizens from another is as vague and unsettling as the distinction between "us" and "them".