The latest salvo from our Supreme Court for 2007 was the overturning of the High Court decision that the Minister for Justice unlawfully breached the rights of several Irish citizen children by refusing their foreign national parents’ applications to remain in Ireland under the one-off ‘generous’ IBC/05 scheme.
If we needed proof that the law serves the Irish racial state, then such proof is provided by the decision of the Supreme Court to uphold the minister’s refusal to allow a group of fathers permission to remain under the so-called IBC/05 revised arrangement for processing claims by parents of Irish citizen children (dubbed by the state ‘Irish-born children’) to remain in Ireland.
The scheme, which permitted 16,693 (out of 17,917) applicants to remain in the State, was the outcome of an arduous two-year campaign by the Coalition against the Deportation of Irish Children (Cadic). Even though the permission to remain is temporary and conditional upon applicants not seeking family reunification, it was very welcome, as I wrote here a few weeks ago.
What is less welcome, however, is the continual bracketing of this group of children and their parents as a special case group, as this recent Supreme Court upholding the refusal to allow this group of fathers to remain demonstrates.
In her judgment, Supreme Court Justice Susan Denham displayed the same logic that was displayed in the 2003 Lobe and Osayande ruling, saying the State has a “fundamental power” to control the entry and exit of foreign nationals, and that the Minister was not required to consider the rights of (citizen) children when considering the parents’ application to remain here. Her judgement demonstrated the privileging of (racial) State logic over the welfare of individual citizens – particularly pathetic when the citizens in question are young children.
While the main applicant in this case, Folajimi Bode, was refused because he was unable to prove continuous residence, the ruling against him must mean that hundreds of families could be split up or deported as a result.
It also means, more seriously, that the Constitutional commitment to the family differentiates between ‘Irish’ and ‘non-Irish’ families, even though the children concerned are Irish citizens and should be entitled to the same rights as all other Irish citizens.
But then, differentiating between ‘Irish children’ – the children of Irish citizens – and ‘Irish-born children’ – the children of non-citizens – marks racialised differences between citizens. Indeed, the results of the 2004 Citizenship Refer-endum, which the Minister of Integration recently claimed was necessary in order to stem the flow of immigrants into this country, means that some Irish citizen children and their families remain less equal than others.
The question for 2008 is whether this rem-ains acceptable. I, for one, am looking forward with dread to the Immig-ration, Residency and Protection Bill, about to be presented to the Dáíl, which makes clear distinctions between entitlements. I am also dreading the introduction of measures such as compulsory language and citizenship tests which the State is about to begin, further differentiating between those entitled and those less entitled.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Eireann
