27th Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland

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Originally Posted by Predator

Can we thank Michael McDowell for that? :)

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A school friend of mine lived next door to him and his family. Witnessed himself and the kids around that time: 2001-2005 probably. Not sure what I can say legally and won't tell the really bad stories but two of the three kids threw around an unbelievable amount of racial and homophobic slurs, both playing football in the shared garden and in front of the old man... i'm sure he's glad the next Michael Obafemi or Dennis Cirkin won't be able to play for Ireland. <worth noting one of the brothers was totally grand>

i also worked in town bar and grill on kildare street as a teenager. you'd get politicians in there every day of the week. only saw mcdowell there once but he treated staff terribly and didn't leave a tip...

Are people still seriously complaining about a referendum which brought us in line with pretty much everywhere else in Europe in order to shut down a loophole being targeted by scam artists and criminal gangs (much like the boats across the Med/English Channel at the moment), all at some risk to people's personal health and indeed at considerable carbon output too?

And all so that we can pretend that a guy who has never shown the least interest in playing for Ireland might be able to play?

Honest to God like - have people no sense of perspective...?

I was being facetious...

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Originally Posted by pineapple stu

Are people still seriously complaining about a referendum which brought us in line with pretty much everywhere else in Europe in order to shut down a loophole being targeted by scam artists and criminal gangs (much like the boats across the Med/English Channel at the moment), all at some risk to people's personal health and indeed at considerable carbon output too?

And all so that we can pretend that a guy who has never shown the least interest in playing for Ireland might be able to play?

Honest to God like - have people no sense of perspective...?

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not sure who you're referring to, cause Cirkin can play if he wants to - and he doesn't need an irish passport to have done what his family did. latvia were joining the EU, his family moved to the UK in 2005 when he was 3 and they were an EU country, so the Irish passport if he ever got it made no material difference to him or the family. Obafemi is an actual case of this and he's always proudly represented Ireland both at underage level and as a senior.

There's several hundred kids who have lived here all their lives here and could be deported next month. there were 134 kids born in ireland, lived all their lives in ireland deported in a 5 year period between 2013 and 2018 and at the time (2018) there were 285 minors with deportation orders out on them, many of who aren't citizens to any country and have never set foot in another country but Ireland.

that's really who we're talking about... this 10 year old boy deported in 2020, born and lived all his life in Ireland: https://archive.is/RZDXY - would have been a citizen if born a decade earlier and could have gone on to play for Ireland.

it's also not like jus soli is an alien concept that only Ireland had. still exists in USA, Canada, Brazil etc. etc. etc. As for Europe, ironically mentioning Cirkin, if a kid is born in Latvia today, like Obafemi was, they'd be entitled to Latvian citizenship. Even in the UK, the kid who was deported in the link above would be entitled to a British passport.

I think to take things to an individual level and make it about the kids really defeats the point of the McDowell argument, which is that it was entirely legitimate to shut down a route into the country (and indeed remains legitimate to shut down routes such as the boats across the Med/Channel) where people traffickers and criminal gangs take advantage of poor people (but not so poor that they can't afford to pay a few grand). There's all sorts of sustainability and carbon and even equity arguments to be made in favour of it, and the complaints about it so we can resolve our left-back problem (which have been on other threads here too) are really silly.

I've no problems with deportations btw - really they should be quicker and that would reduce the impact. It's unfortunate the kids are caught up in it of course, but that's the risk their parents knowingly took, and having kids shouldn't absolve them from their actions.

(And Predator's comment noted too, which is fair enough.)

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Originally Posted by pineapple stu

I think to take things to an individual level and make it about the kids really defeats the point of the McDowell argument

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but it is always about the individuals and when it comes to that specific law, it is about the kids. the idea that someone like, i dunno, Rhasidat Adeleke or Sinclair Armstrong would be deported as a 14 year old having grown up here and spent their whole life here to me is totally unconscionable.

there's a whole other moral argument - i believe someone born on the island of ireland is irish. so long as they identify that way and choose to be, then they're irish. i think it's that simple. i know the likes of hermann kelly and tommy robinson and a few forum members might disagree - but that's the way i see the world...

No, I don't agree - I think the bigger picture has to take priority. Then you can see criminal gangs being empowered (there's plenty of examples of this, the most recent being the BBC documentary on the Balkans last month where an unemployed person from Elbasan in Albania paid £23k for a trip on a dinghy from Holland to England, to be repaid with six months' drug laundering), vulnerable people being taken advantage of (same point really), asylum shoppers taking the mick, a transfer of labour capital from poorer countries to richer countries perpetuating divides in global equity standards, huge increases in carbon by moving people half-way around the world (this applies to Irish people moving to Australia as well of course - in a climate crisis, I think no-one should have the right to move somewhere such that to visit close relatives generates a year's worth of carbon and more). I also don't think you should use kids to hold a country to ransom in deportation cases, as you seem to be suggesting.

I think there's far more nuance to the issue than you're making out.

I also don't agree on your definition of an Irish person btw. Some people are excellent at adopting a local culture, others not so. There's some big cultural gaps around the world which are too far to bridge. Is a burqa-wearing person Irish if they're born here, identify as Irish, but reject Irish customs and don't engage in Irish culture for example? Again, there's more nuance than you're allowing.

Ultimately, this idea that you can simply hop on a flight half-way around the world when nine months pregnant (presumably at some personal health risk of course), land in a country, claim bogus asylum, then have a baby while the claim was being processed and hey presto you can stay in the country - that's an indefensible scam which it was entirely correct to shut down.