AN IMMIGRANT doctor who had worked for eight years in the Irish health service was denied naturalisation because she had broken a red traffic light on her bicycle, a conference in UCC was told yesterday.
Catherine Cosgrave, senior solicitor with the Immigrant Council of Ireland, told the conference on gender, religion and multiculturalism that this was one example of where people are refused naturalisation as Irish citizens for not fulfilling the “good character” requirement, having come to the “adverse attention” of the Garda.
In this case the authorities had at least given a reason. Another applicant was refused three times without any reason being given. There is no legal obligation to provide reasons and the law provides the Minister for Justice with “absolute discretion” in relation to both naturalisation and long-term residency.
This was combined with a lack of any appeal system, she said. While it was possible to have a decision judicially reviewed, in recent cases the courts had observed that when the Minister was satisfied an applicant fulfilled the relevant criteria he may nevertheless refuse to grant naturalisation at his absolute discretion.
The official language surrounding immigration and integration in Ireland was welcoming, but the practice, as the experience of the immigrant council demonstrated, was indifference at best or intolerance at worst, she said.
The debate would be better informed if there was more information in the public domain about what actually happened, but the existence of absolute discretion and the opacity of the system made this impossible.
Ireland is well-placed to engage with the debate on the place of religion in public life now taking place in Europe in the context of immigration, a legal expert claimed.
Siobhán Mullally, senior lecturer in law in UCC, said that the increasing focus on integration in Irish and EU immigration policy raised questions as to how religious and cultural claims can be accommodated within a liberal democracy. This was topical in Ireland following the recent publication of the Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill 2010.
The conference is part of an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences project examining the potential for conflict between gender equality and religious claims in Ireland, drawing on the experience of neighbouring countries.
Ireland could not claim to have the secular tradition of France and Turkey and the role of religion in public life was linked to a historical context, Ms Mullally said.
Against this background, judicial interpretations of the “common good” have sometimes imposed constraints on manifestations of religious belief, in an attempt to safeguard a delicate accommodation of different faith traditions. The prevailing European view of secularism, requiring a strict demarcation between the public and the private, may bring with it harsh exclusions, she said.
Much of the controversy surrounding religion in the public sphere has centred on Muslims and on Muslim women in particular. She pointed to a case in France where the exclusion of a woman wearing the niqab (full veil) from the compulsory language instruction that forms part of the immigration process was found not to violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
There was clearly a potential for conflict between such integration conditions and human rights law, she said. Testing for integration brought with it the danger of ethnically-based notions of belonging and membership of a society.
The stigmatisation of Muslim women and girls through the attention given to the issue of the veil was restricting the possibility of fairer multicultural arrangements that might lessen the burdens of democratic participation on religious citizens, she said.
