Covid-19 laces granting of Irish citizenship with danger
Blood link criteria dates from era of open borders before US and UK were destabilised
This era of radical uncertainty and suddenly dubious assumptions about the nature of the world and the future raises significant issues about Irish citizenship law. Photograph: Frank Miller
The Covid-19 crisis has upended expectations about how the world works and how we thought the future would be. One of its key casualties has been the expectation that the future was likely to be characterised by ever more integrated flows of people and goods across borders.
As the crisis worsened this spring, airports and ports fell silent as travel became subject to increasing restrictions. Despite decades of rhetoric and European court rulings around free movement, even within the EU, many states closed their borders to non-citizens.