Around 11,000 Irish citizens, most of them infants and young children, face deportation because their parents are not recognised as entitled to reside in this State. That is the harsh legal reality since the Supreme Court judgment last January ruled that the non-national parents of an Irish-born child cannot, as a matter of course, claim the right to live in Ireland.
The judgment, it must be recalled, did not give a green light to wholesale deportations, but called for each case to be considered on its merits and for the respective rights involved to be balanced carefully. The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, has said he will respect these stipulations.
Last week the deadline ran out for at least 700 families who had not responded to official correspondence from the Minister, saying they must make a presentation to his Department if they wish to stay in Ireland on humanitarian grounds. Support groups for the families involved say there is "absolute panic" among them. This is quite understandable. There is a real lack of resources available to those who wish to make such presentations, which must be funded privately. And the fact that the letters have been sent out during the holiday season seems to assume the issues concerned will receive minimal political or media scrutiny.
That there has been an extremely close association between legal realities and immigrant behaviour is shown by the fact that in the two years to January last 9,662 applications for asylum were withdrawn on the basis of the parentage of an Irish-born child, for which residency was claimed. This bore out suspicions that the asylum system was being side-stepped. But such behaviour was understandable, indeed excusable, on the basis of the law as it stood before the Supreme Court judgment. It ruled that no general right of residency can be based on the Fajujonu judgment of 1990, when a Nigerian man and his Moroccan wife successfully argued that their Irish-born child was entitled to their society and care in Ireland, where they had lived for eight years.
Whatever the merits of the Supreme Court judgment (and it came with two dissenting views pointing up the enhanced rights of citizens under the new Article 2 of the Constitution and its abiding assertion of family rights), it is clearly intended to repair an anomaly in Irish law rather than to establish a legal basis for deporting all those who had their children here in order to benefit from it. Future such claims should be its target, not those who have made the enormous commitment of having a child entitled to Irish citizenship as a token of their own desire to stay in Ireland.
They are welcome here and have much to contribute in making this a more diverse and dynamic society.
Rather than being blamed or penalised they deserve the greatest respect for their rights, for the length of time they have been here and for the disadvantageous and frightening position they are put into as a result of this judgment and the deadlines put to them.