Ireland’s Citizenship Debate: Has Irish Citizenship Been Devalued By Immigration?

Citizenship is the most valuable status a State can bestow on an individual. It confers a person with a form of collective ownership of the State and its political institutions. However, while the historical norm is for individuals to receive this status by virtue of their parentage or birth within the boundaries of the State, that is no longer the case. Naturalisation, the ability of a foreign national to be granted citizenship of the country in which they reside, has become more commonplace. In Ireland, it has been reported that almost 235,000 people have been granted citizenship through naturalisation from 2011 to the present day.

For a country with a population of around 5.5 million people, it is simply not sustainable for Irish citizenship to be handed out like confetti. Central to this debate in recent months is the fact that Ireland does not require any civic, language, or social testing as part of its naturalisation process. Under current rules, a non-national only requires 5 years of residency in the State to obtain citizenship. These inadequacies indicate that the Irish citizenship system was simply never built with safeguards in mind to prevent its exploitation. Now, 22 years since the Irish public voted to remove birthright citizenship from the country’s constitution, we face yet another issue with government immigration policy.

In 2004 the Irish electorate chose to end jus soli citizenship rights for children born in Ireland to non-Irish parents and replace it with a system of parental citizenship like the model used in much of the European Union. The proximal cause of this referendum was the exploitation of Ireland’s immigration rules through the use of ‘ancor babies’ and the abuse of the complexity around the granting of Irish citizenship to children from Northern Ireland due to the region’s status under British jurisdiction.

Yet despite such a constitutional change to the rules governing who receives Irish citizenship, the country remained completely indolent towards any consideration of its naturalisation process. The reason, for the time period, was that this was simply not widespread enough to warrant any serious investigation from Ireland’s slothish bureaucrats and politicians.

Now, in recognition that Irish citizenship is too easy for prospective migrants to receive, the Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan has stated the government will move towards an 8 year residency requirement in addition to obligatory civics and language testing. Migrants and the left-wing opposition have come out to criticise these new changes as unfair, particularly on the grounds that people who would have been on the precipice of meeting the old 5 year residency requirement are now faced with a 3 year extension.

The Minister for Justice, rightfully, countered these claims with the assertion that for migrants truly committed to making Ireland their home, a 3 year extension should not be an issue for them at all. Yet despite these claims, he still stated the government was considering a “more generous scheme” for those disadvantaged by the new rules to be introduced. This year Irish citizenship applications surged in September to 8,765 after the changes were announced. With applications in August numbering 2,611, the increase in applications stands at 236 percent.

The issues surrounding Ireland’s lax naturalisation system have been known to the government for a long time. In 2020 the Economic and Social Research Institute, the State’s primary policy advisory think tank, noted that Ireland had some of the most favourable conditions for migrants in the European Union. In its analysis, the ESRI established that the top reasons for refusal are failure to meet the residency criteria as well as the good character requirements of the existing Irish process. Indicative of Ireland’s lack of thought in its citizenship procedures, good character is not defined by the Department of Justice and no guidelines for how the term should be interpreted. To this day there is still no statutory definition of what good character means for those eligible to obtain Irish citizenship.

The European Migrant Network Ireland through its leader Emma Quin said to the ESRI for its 2020 study, that for Ireland “citizenship is recognised as a key measure to support the integration of migrants.” The problem with that mentality is that it treats integration as a permanent process with an undefined end-point, with citizenship being merely just one vague step. Speaking in terms of the integration of migrants, conferring the status and honour of Irish citizenship to an individual should be the final measure in the integration process. Citizenship, once granted, is difficult to revoke unless evidence of fraudulent claims made to authorities as part of the application process come to light and undermine the legitimacy of the candidate’s application. As such, the Irish government is right to change its rules to be more restrictive. Unfortunately, like all Irish public policy, they are introducing a half-measure which will not address the fundamental underlying concerns.

The Irish conceptualisation of citizenship today is drastically different to the historic understanding its founders had during the foundation of the state. The basic principles of citizenship in the new Irish Republic were best summarised in the 1916 Proclamation, which declared the “right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies” and further proclaimed the establishment of a sovereign Irish State with the loyalties of its citizens. The concept of citizenship in Ireland at that time was demonstrably understood to be limited to Irish men and Irish women. Later, while the Irish Free State determined how to practically roll out the citizenship entitlements of the new state, they eventually settled on those who were ordinarily resident in addition to their Irish ancestry. This came from the complexities of creating new governmental institutions and procedures while remaining part of the British Commonwealth. As such, the granting of Irish citizenship to non-Irish persons was in origin born from an understanding of the nation’s geographic and social relationship with the British people, not to mention jurisdictional conflict over Northern Ireland. This itself is seen in the ESRI’s contemporary research, with the 2020 study on Irish citizenship identifying British nationals in the top three EU nationalities applying for citizenship alongside Romanians and Polish.

Ireland has found itself again acting in a politically naive manner towards fundamental competencies of a modern State. Successive governments in Leinster House have failed to treat this issue with the gravity it commands, perhaps because the country lacks genuine civic participation or pride in its own institutions. Whether it be the emigration crisis in the 1950s and 1960s or the contemporary immigration crisis, Ireland has dealt with population transfer continually throughout its modern history. Frequently, these demographic changes have shaped the economic prospects of the country for the following decades. One can only hope that the modern wave of immigration is temporary and that new restrictions curb the influx of new residents before it is able to manifest into negative economic consequences; though there are already signs that the country’s housing crisis has been exacerbated by the government’s demographic irresponsibility.

As for the reason why Irish politicians have acted with such intransigence towards the issue of migration, one can only turn to their ideological blindness to the concerns of the general public. It is an irony that only Irish politicians are capable of; being obsessed with the idea of ‘fairness’ whilst ensuring that they are personally as unaccountable to the Irish public and their interests as possible.