Madam, - In response to some of the letters in recent days, may I clear up one serious misapprehension about what is at stake on June 11th? Despite the deliberately generated popular perception, this referendum is emphatically not about ensuring that our immigration laws are not flouted by mothers arriving in Ireland late in pregnancy, giving birth in Irish maternity hospitals and then demanding to be entitled (along with the rest of their families) to stay in Ireland with their newly-produced Irish citizen child.
Such perceived abuse of immigration control has already been prevented by a recent decision of the Irish Supreme Court in which the existing constitutional protections both of citizenship and of the family were deemed not to oblige the State to afford residency rights to the families of Irish citizens. And the reality of the situation is obviously that if an immigrant family is deported, then they will take their children with them whether or not they are Irish.
In other words, the referendum will make no practical difference to the nature of Irish immigration control, and for the Minister for Justice to pretend that it will is deeply and inexcusably disingenuous.
It is, however, no more disingenuous than his failure to consult human rights commissions in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as well as the all-party committee on the Constitution before proceeding with this proposal.
In order to determine what the referendum is actually about, it is necessary to consider the nature both of citizenship and of constitutions.
As to the former, and despite the suggestion from Kevin Doyle (Letters, May 7th) that citizenship arises exclusively by the nationality of one's parents, in fact it is a long-standing principle of international law that citizenship can and does also arise by reference to one's birth - in other words, that one is entitled to be the citizen of the country in which one is born. This does not of itself afford any further rights to the citizen, but it does give to the baby, the child and the adult that most valuable and yet intangible of commodities when one is vulnerable, namely the feeling of belonging.
As to the latter, the Constitution is not, as the Minister would see it, a grudging set of rules restraining government activity that must be altered or twisted in order for changes in social policy to be allowed to run smoothly. Rather it is a noble, aspirational document - a set of claims that goes to the heart of the Irish ethos and defines the Irish people.
What this referendum seeks to do therefore, is to insert a claim into the heart of the Irish ethos to the effect that normal principles of citizenship can be suspended in the case of those who are not properly "one of us". It tells people in the starkest terms (rendered more stark because of the intentional choice to amend the Constitution) that we do not wish them to know a sense of belonging. It says that our land is under no circumstances to be a land of new starts and fresh chances but rather that genetic connection to the pure Irish race is a necessary pre-requisite of Irishness.
I don't like this claim. I don't associate it with the positive qualities of Irishness - generosity, empathy and compassion - that make me proud of the fact that, due to the enormous good fortune of the context of my birth, I am Irish. Eoin MacMahon (May 7th) says my colleague and friend Ivana Bacik is out of touch in her arguments. She and I come from very different political viewpoints, but on this issue she expresses my moral sentiments perfectly. - Yours, etc.,
Dr NEVILLE COX, Law School, Trinity College, Dublin 2.