“I believe in citizenship. Citizenship entitles people to rights. In modern Ireland, these should include the right to food and water, to a home and a decent job with a fair wage, to health and education services and a cleaner, safer environment.”
So wrote Gerry Adams two years ago, in an article that stuck in my mind because it was so revealingly confused.
Few rights are conferred by citizenship and it is unlikely Adams believes they ought to be — Sinn Féin certainly does not, nor do most political parties.
Fundamental human rights, such as those in the European Convention, apply equally to everyone in a state’s territory, including illegal immigrants. The right to vote is a rare exception.
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Civic rights, such as the economic and social rights listed by Adams, have also become largely detached from citizenship in both Ireland and the UK. This has evolved through decades of anti-discrimination law and practice, much of it underpinned by human rights law. EU membership and free trade agreements have further required treating citizens and non-citizens equally. Ideologies from the left to the right are diluting what citizenship means.
The most that can usually be attempted is to define entitlement around a residency test, as the Government is currently proposing for housing support. It is introducing a Bill that will require social housing applicants to be both lawfully and habitually resident in the state. Non-citizens can meet the first requirement and citizens can fail the second, making this a test that exists essentially beyond citizenship.
Yet rights bodies and NGOs are denouncing the Bill as cruel, dangerous and discriminatory. The UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing has called it “nativist”. For much of the rights sector, it is unacceptable to restrict entitlements even by residency, let alone citizenship.
Ireland offers a residency status indistinguishable from citizenship for most practical purposes: ‘long-term residency without condition as to time’. Its British equivalent is the marvellously-titled ‘indefinite leave to remain’.
Citizenship is mocked by near-identical forms of non-citizenship for non-citizens.
The UK is now confronting these questions due to Nigel Farage’s Reform party.
In June, Farage said a Reform government would give all non-citizens three months to leave social housing. This week, Reform published a plan for the welfare system that would “make British citizenship a condition for accessing almost every form of benefit”.
Other parts of the 50-page plan indicate Irish citizens would also qualify. Reform is not strong on details — unable to answer basic questions on how its policies would work, or explain how it would renegotiate the social security aspects of trade deals.
But details are beside the point. Reform knows that merely by raising these ideas it is reflecting and driving public debate.
Northern Ireland made its own bizarre contribution to this debate with the DeSouza case a decade ago. Campaigner Emma DeSouza argued British citizenship should not be imposed upon most people in Northern Ireland at birth. Instead, they should choose British or Irish citizenship, or both, on reaching adulthood.
She won the support of rights groups, political parties and government figures in the UK, Ireland and the United States. Some unionists joined her, including then UUP leader Mike Nesbitt, impressed by her argument that unionists should not have Irish citizenship forced upon them in a united Ireland.
The courts finally threw this all out in 2019, ruling people could not be rendered stateless under national law, international law or common sense.
None of DeSouza’s supporters seemed to realise that withholding citizenship on ethnic grounds would be outrageous, not a mark of respect. Nationalists whose parents marched against being treated as second-class citizens cheered on a campaign for everyone to be non-citizens by default. Unionists looked forward to being second-class in a united Ireland. It is only possible to think like this if citizenship has been reduced in your eyes to a badge of identity.
But there is clearly a deep sense that citizenship should mean far more, including unique rights and access to services. This is a concept baked into our civilisation since ancient times, freshly sharpened by immigration, and still imbued in the thinking of people who might believe they are above it, as revealed by Adams’ article.
Rather than a prejudice or a means of exclusion, a strict approach to citizenship would be a policy of inclusion. If every immigrant had to acquire citizenship before accessing benefits and services, there would be less resentment about immigration and more cohesion between citizens of every background.
The Government has been asked if it would deny housing to foreigners in urgent need.
Reform has been asked if it would deny benefits to migrant workers who have paid taxes for years.
There is a moral case that the answer to these questions should be yes.
