No-one under 67 has a Constitutional Right to Irish Citizenship

dublin | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis

Sunday June 06, 2004 08:27

by Robbie

This will not change if proposal is passed

Nationhood or Nationality is not citizenship. Article 2 deals with Nationhood. Article 9 deals with citizenship.

Nationality and citizenship are different concepts. For instance, under British law, a national (for instance, from a British colony like Hong Kong) doesn’tt have an automatic right to citizenship. For excample, on their passport under ‘Nationality’ they have ‘British’, as distinct form ‘British Citizen’ on that of the vast majority of nationals.

The Guardian’s website defines:

Citizen - a person who is a member of a state with rights and duties that result from that membership

Nation - a group of people with a common cultural identity

the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act, 2001, sees nationality and citizenship as being the same thing, but, apart from Article 9-3, they are treated separately in the Constitution.

Article 2 says that anyone born on the island of Ireland is automatically part of the Irish nation, as is anyone who is a citizen. Article 9 says that anyone born in Ireland before 1937 is automatically a citizen. Nowhere is citizenship guaranteed for in the constitution apart from this.

Therefore, no-one, from whatever country of origin including Ireland itself, has automatic entitlement to citizenship under theeir (elite) constitution. Legislation has seen to the rest.

The amendment will not change this. It says that certain people with no Irish blood (what colour – Green?) in them, have no entitlement to citizenship under the constitution.

Since no-one (including those born of both Irish, or both non-Irish parents) apart from those born in Ireland before 1937) has constitutional rights to citizenship, voting yes would do absolutely nothing except give satisfaction to the inept.

If changes were necessary, they could be brought about by legislation (their being nothing in the constitution about citizenship entitlement except Article 9); but knowing this crowd’s history of passports to rich Saudi ‘businessmen’, such legislation is likely to be richist, rather than racist.

Stating the constitutionally obvious is bad enough; perhaps, designed to distract public opinion from the government’s incompetence in everything else as well. The Left have taken this point, but ignored the actual content. Ivana Bacik sees ‘notwithstanding’ as being the important word in the amendment, but this could have no relevance to Article 2, because it doesn’t address entitlement to citizenship, but only right to be part of ‘the Irish nation’ (whatever commerce decides that means to someone from Killenarden or Tacumshin).

Nations and states rarely if ever coincide, but are aspirations dreamt up by a new religion of Eighteenth Century Romanticism, the latest bogus justification for the existence or legitemacy of the state.

Insum, the proposed amendment appears to be irrelevent gobbeldigook (like most law), whatever the outcome of the referendum, but they shouldn’t have wasted our precious time and money, or their own stifled energy.