Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland
Point taken tets. I won’t go comment again or detail how the rhetoric used was similar to what Suella Braverman is using in in the UK regarding refugees and what Trump used regarding building a wall - but I do think there probably needs to be something said in reply to the above - as right now it gives a pretty inaccurate depiction of what happened:
1. McDowell’s legislation prior to the referendum had already brought liability to the airlines (Immigration Act of 2003)
2. The idea that “up to 29% of births” were because of that “scam” is laughable. There were 17,000 parents effected by the legislative changes prior to the referendum where parents were no longer granted automatic right to remain (Immigration Act of 2004). 17,000 parents is 8,500 kids if every kid has 2 parents - so let’s call it 9,000 kids (we can ignore later siblings for the scam argument). That’s 9,000 kids across 18 years - which is 500 per year - although it’s pretty heavily weighted from 1996 onwards due to overall immigration, although there were significant communities from North Africa, China, Turkey, Australia, Romania etc etc which existed prior to that, so it’s not like there were no kids in Ireland born to non-Irish people before 1996 - so let’s weight it at 750 kids per year being born when McDowell came in - which is about 1.5% of the new births in Ireland in a given year. That pool was made up of all kinds of people, people who were on all kinds of non-permanent visas (either working or student or anything else), refugees who had kids while waiting a number of years for a decision on their status, and so on. So you can see how big and varied a pie that is - it was about 170,000 - so when both parents were from that pool - that was a kid who would have made up the approx 750 born every year. And therefore what a small fraction were heavily pregnant people arriving. As a kid, I spoke to someone from the department of Justice at SARI’s annual soccerfest in Phoenix park (they have always had a team playing at it) a few months after the referendum who described it as a non-issue where there was only a handful of people doing it (pretty sure he said the number of heavily pregnant women arriving was in single digits - but anyway).
3. As an aside, Mcdowell promised to speed people’s refugee status assessment to 3 months, so it’d all be sorted quickly. There’s people still in direct provision from his time there 16 years ago.
4. Directly relating to football, the result of removing the constitutional right has meant that they (DOJ/immigration) were further able to restrict the rights to citizenship. For example, a friend of mine is Italian and he had a kid here. He had lived in Ireland for 2.5 years before the kid was born but the as an EU citizen, the couple needed to be living for 3 years in Ireland before the birth for the kid to be an irish citizen - so instead the child is an Italian and Brazilian citizen (only taking Italian citizenship cause she wasn’t eligible for irish citizenship and they wanted her to have an EU passport.) There’ll be loads of cases like this. All our hopes of a Brazilian influx of talent is basically eroded by that. Over the next decade, we’ll see a lot of ridiculous cases where Irish kids aren’t eligible to play for Ireland.
