McDowell slips badly this time

In 1997, the current Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, was down and out

In 1997, the current Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, was down and out. He had just lost his seat in what was a disastrous election for the Progressive Democrats.

He is reported to have remarked that he would never again work alongside "Thelma and Louise", his party colleagues Mary Harney and Liz O'Donnell.

But with those days long forgotten, it was rather the Minister for Justice himself who crashed and burned last week.

He appeared beleaguered on all fronts. The Masters of the Dublin maternity hospitals accused him of exaggerating their concerns about births to non-nationals, and of claiming they had made statements to him which they downright denied.

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Amnesty International categorically denied the Minister's claim that it had apologised to the Taoiseach for its anti-racism ad campaign last year. In both cases, there was no middle ground, no sense that perhaps they could all be telling the truth.

The phoenix-like resurrection of Michael McDowell since his "Thelma and Louise" days has spelt bad news for anyone in this country who is not Irish. Having dealt, in theory at least, with non-national adults, the Minister has now turned his stony attention to their babies. No longer will they be able to become Irish citizens simply by virtue of the fact they have been born on Irish soil, if McDowell's proposed referendum is passed.

This has been presented as an issue which has only recently arisen since the enshrining of the Belfast Agreement in our Constitution, that it is an unintended consequence of a desire to offer citizenship to all the people of Northern Ireland.

In fact, it is nothing of the kind. Ireland's stated policy on the automatic citizenship rights of babies born on Irish soil goes back to the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1935. A similar Act in 1956 unambiguously repeated that all babies born on Irish soil (regardless of parentage) were Irish citizens.

For the entire life of this State, we have held to a person's fundamental right to the country of his or her birth. In this regard, we have always been closer to Boston than to Berlin. In the US, all babies born there automatically qualify for citizenship, regardless of the nationality of their parents.

As in Ireland, this has been a most important statement about how a country defines itself and its people.

Fortress Europe has little to teach us in this regard. It has long held to the old and tired principle of the rights of blood (known as jus sanguinis) over those of soil (jus soli). A rigid and closed definition of nationality has rigorously excluded those without the blood of that nation in their veins.

So only those whose parents were, for instance, German could qualify for German citizenship. Although slowly beginning to change, this remains the entrenched and narrow attitude of "old world" Europe.

To date, in Ireland, we were of the "new world", embracing those born on our soil as having a stake in this society and consequently entitled to citizenship. We are now being asked to choose between these two worlds, and to choose the old world model.

The Minister for Justice has claimed that the recent removal of residence rights to the non-national parents of a baby Irish citizen have not worked, that the number of non-national mothers in Ireland has not been reduced significantly.

He has spoken of "citizenship tourism", of "massive inflows" of non-nationals to the maternity hospitals, of the situation "snowballing out of control", and of the Masters of the Dublin hospitals "pleading" with him to change the laws on citizenship.

Put very simply, none of this is really true. The Masters themselves have accused the Minister of exaggeration, and the figures bear them out.

Take the Coombe Hospital, for example. The increase in non-national births last year was just 2 per cent. As with the other Dublin hospitals, a major portion of its 20 per cent of foreign mothers were living and working in Ireland entirely legally, with many from Britain and other EU countries, and the US.

They are among the growing number of fully legal immigrants on which this country is becoming vitally dependent for its economic survival, now and into the future. In the overall context of Ireland's rapidly declining birth rate, our society has no choice but to change or die.

As regards the relatively small percentage of mothers who arrive in Ireland late in pregnancy, this is certainly a problem for under-resourced hospitals. The solution though is not to alter a fundamental tenet of our national definition of what constitutes Irishness - rather it is to increase those resources.

The Minister for Justice, in what was perhaps a Freudian slip, referred on RTÉ Radio last week to "a very black scene" in terms of the pressures on our maternity hospitals. While he has furiously rejected any suggestion that his proposal to limit citizenship rights is in any way racist, it is difficult not to be fearful that ultimately this will indeed be its primary effect.