Citizenship, Political Engagement, and Belonging: Immigrants in Europe and the United States

Chapter 3: The Irish Citizenship Referendum (2004): Motherhood and Belonging in Ireland

60 Chapter 3 The Irish Citizenship Referendum (2004) Motherhood and Belonging in Ireland Angèle Smith Joanne has found the first two years of her life in Ireland an uphill struggle. “Sometimes I feel like killing myself,” she says, her voice breaking. “Only for my children, I don’t think I could cope.” —Quoted in Bracken 2005 “Oh yes, I do get depressed and sometimes I cry,” says Odette. “But like I say before, you have to put on a brave face for them.” She looks at her eight-year-old daughter, dressed in a navy school uniform, playing at the sink. “You go to your friends here to spill your problems. But you are helpless. You have no control. It is like you are at the mercy of the system.” —Quoted in Holland 2005 Ideas of citizenship are ideas of belonging. In this chapter I examine how female asylum seekers in Ireland attempt to find some sense of belonging in their host country at a time when the Irish state has, through changes in Irish citizenship laws, changed what it means to belong in Ireland. In June 2004 a referendum was held to determine whether a change in the Irish Constitution should be made to redefine one’s rights to citizenship and hence belonging in Ireland. The vote outcome was 79 percent in favor of the amendment (BBC, 13 June 2004). As the best local election turnout in nearly twenty years, it suggests the overwhelming wish The Irish Citizenship Referendum 61 of the Irish public to change the Irish citizenship from one based on place of birth on the island of Ireland (jus soli) to one based on being born in Ireland of at least one parent who is a citizen of Ireland (jus sanguinis). That Irish citizenship had been associated with birthplace and the rights of the land is not surprising given that a deep-seated ideology grown of a long colonial history, links Irishness and a sense of place. Under colonial rule, the Irish were disenfranchised from the right to their land; they were marginalized within their own home. The consequence was a divide between the Irish and the British colonizer based on a sense of belonging to the place of Ireland.1 In Ireland there is an ideology that the outside “Others” have long been their neighbors, the British. As a corollary, there is an ideology that Ireland has always been homogenously white. What happens then when the newcomers seeking asylum are nonwhite? What happens to the sense of Irish identity? To say that Ireland has never known a multiethnic community within its borders is historically not accurate. Yet with ministers of government being quoted saying that “today in Ireland , as never before, there is racism and discrimination,” the message is clearly that the current immigration into Ireland is somehow different and more threatening. That threat led to changing citizenship laws to be about birth- and not place-rights, thus effectively excluding female asylum seekers ’ children born in Ireland. Michael Dummett writes that “it is from the concept of citizenship that our prevailing notions of the rights and duties of a State derive” (2001: 80). These rights and duties include the rights to residency and to vote, and the duty to pay taxes and abide by the laws of the country. Citizenship determines who is considered part of the national community and who is to be excluded. Thus the concept of citizenship is inextricably linked to a sense of identity (see Anderson 1991; Gellner 1983; Hutchinson and Smith 1994) as David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook explain: Identities have been forged on the basis of many possible imagined attributes : the myth of common ancestry, the inheritance of blood, the binding force of tribal tradition, custom and belief are historically among the most widespread. With the rise of nation states in the late eighteenth to late twentieth centuries, new elements of definition begin to emerge: notions of citizenship defined by common ideals and the right to reside in the country of birth rather than of ancestry began to overlay or displace the primacy of kinship. Perceiving something of a sea-change in bases of identity in the modern era, historians and social scientists have for some time been grappling with an attempt to define the concept of national identity (1996: 1). 62 A n g è l e S m i t h...