“I would have cut out my heart and given it to him, if it would have made any difference,” Agnes avows to William Shakespeare as she lambasts herself for failing to keep their child alive.
Later, the credits roll. The lights are switched on. Patrons remain riveted to their cinema seats. Faces are wet, eyes dazed by what they have seen. Hamnet has many dimensions. The movie deals with love, loss, grief, guilt, blame, redemption, and the achievement of immortality through the medium of art.
Running through it all is the raw, primeval instinct we humans have to keep those we hold dearest close to us.
This week, Ireland has been celebrating Killarney woman Jessie Buckley’s deserved award of a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Shakespeare’s wife, as imagined by Coleraine-native Maggie O’Farrell in her inspirational novel. The Bard’s heart-wrenching rendition by Kildare’s Paul Mescal merits an award, too. How apt, one might think, that a country that prides itself on cherishing the family has excelled in representing its nuclear essence.
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But the breathless accolades have overshadowed another story that also evokes Hamnet’s predominant theme. The difference is that this one has a heartless denouement.
Amid the joyous success of Hamnet, the Cabinet has approved the International Protection Bill 2026. The draft legislation obliges those granted refugee status to wait three years before applying to be reunited with their families in Ireland.
Add on the time it takes to deliver an initial asylum decision – the median wait is currently 14 months, though the Government has said it will cut it to 12 weeks – plus the time it takes to process reunification applications. According to the Irish Refugee Council, we are talking the best part of five years before families can be reunited.
Children grow up fast in five years, evolving from Shakespeare’s “mewling infants” into “whining” young scholars, even in conditions of war and deprivation that a parent has felt compelled to flee for safety.
Jim O’Callaghan, the Minister for Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, who brought the proposal to Cabinet, denies the three-year requirement is cruel. Any father who has fled from persecution in war-torn Sudan or any daughter who has escaped the Taliban’s dehumanising gender apartheid in Afghanistan might disagree.
Many of those seeking international protection here have made long and hazardous journeys after leaving their families behind. To be approved for refugee status they have had to prove a “well-founded fear” of persecution in their home country. They will have answered questionnaires, attended interviews and provided medical reports and other evidentiary documents.
The proposed measure is designed to be a deterrent to those abroad who may be considering Ireland as a place of asylum. It is yet more pandering to vociferous anti-immigration protesters and an entrenchment of the false impression that immigration is causing this country’s housing crisis.
Note how quickly the Government can act to appease the Ireland-for-the-Irish cohort while battalions of Tricolours are allowed to continue flying from public lamp-posts to intimidate migrants and human rights advocates.
By increasing the time refugees must wait before applying to bring their close family members to Ireland, the Government will further fuel protesters’ xenophobic chants about “unvetted single men”. That does not improve society.
[ Ireland should resist cheap, tough talk on migrationOpens in new window ]
Nor does it contribute to the common good to continue isolating from their families individuals who have already suffered the psychological effects of dangerous flight from their home countries. Protracted separation puts marriages and partnerships under greater strain and dices with the risk of older family members dying before the deadline expires.
Family reunification accounts for little more than 1 per cent of migration into Ireland. Telling people granted refugee status to wait three years – until their children no longer recognise them – is not the stance of a country that professes to cherish the family unit.
Simon Harris has pronounced that a significant number of homeless people have no right to a house when, in fact, nobody has a constitutional right to one.
What the Constitution does have, though, is article 41, which guarantees to protect the family as “the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society [with] inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law”.
More than a million people voted against changing article 41 in the 2024 family and care referendums following a campaign that reverberated with laments about how seldom it has been tested in the law courts.
Now here is a gift horse for some adroit lawyers to blow the dust off it by asserting the State’s constitutional obligation to protect its treasured family. If O’Callaghan were not the author of the Bill, he could don his horsehair wig and wage war against it in the Four Courts.
[ ‘Victim blaming’: refugee council criticises O’Callaghan’s asylum seeker commentsOpens in new window ]
One wonders if President Catherine Connolly, who has worked as a barrister, will refer the Bill to the Supreme Court for adjudication on its constitutionality or sign it into law, thus allowing subsequent challenges to it. The silence of many pro-family voices that passionately cavilled against the 2024 referendums is deafening in this context.
If the State finds itself obliged by this proposed legislation to renege on its constitutional duty to protect the family, it will turn Bunreacht na hÉireann into as much a book of fiction as O’Farrell’s Hamnet.
“Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I am thinking: Where is he, where is he?” Will tells Agnes after their son has departed for eternity. “I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience.” The parents’ despair at their child’s absence is bone-crushing.
There is likely to be another national tizzy about Hamnet next week when the Oscar nominations are due to be announced on Thursday. Rightly so, for the film is a tour de force and Ireland will bask in its glory.
But, as the partying goes on inside, out in the streets will be lonely refugees far from their homeland searching in every crowd for the faces of the ones they love.
To keep parents apart from their children for three additional years for no better reason than that you can is exactly what the Minister says it is not.
It is simply cruel.
