If anything, Mary Robinson was too restrained in her recent remarks about the citizenship referendum of June 2004 but, predictably, she has been assailed from the usual quarters for observations that were polite and reserved, writes Vincent Browne.
For that 2004 referendum was a despicable stunt designed for political advantage and devoid of any rational justification of any sort.
Two arguments were advanced in favour of the constitutional change, which, if valid, would have been some justification for the initiative.
The first was that the constitutional change that was instigated by the Belfast Agreement, whereby any person born on the island of Ireland had a constitutional entitlement to Irish citizenship, opened a dangerous loophole. The supposed loophole was that pregnant women, who had no entitlement to come to Ireland or remain here, would rush to our shores to give birth here. Thereby, it was said, they would be entitling their child and, by extension, themselves and their families to remain here.
The second argument was that because any Irish citizen had a right to remain anywhere within the European Union, and, by extension, their families had a similar right, this was a loophole that endangered not just Irish immigration procedures, but immigration procedures Europe-wide. It was claimed our EU partners were "alarmed" at this prospect.
These arguments would have been persuasive for many people had they been valid but, in fact, both were entirely bogus. And it was on the basis of those bogus arguments that the Irish electorate was conned into voting for the constitutional change. Whether this is patronising or not, as was claimed in a characteristically misinformed opinion piece in last Sunday's Sunday Independent, is neither here nor there. It is what happened.
The first of these arguments was bogus for a simple reason. In a majority judgment of the Supreme Court on January 23rd, 2003, (in a case known as the Lobe case) the court held that there was no entitlement on the part of the parents and family of an Irish citizen child to remain in Ireland and, by inference, if this meant the deportation of the Irish citizen child, along with his/her non-citizen parents, then so be it. In other words, the so-called "loophole" created by the constitutional amendment inaugurated by the Good Friday agreement had been well and truly closed. There was no need for a referendum on citizenship to deal with this "problem".
As for the second argument: if there was no entitlement to remain in Ireland, there was no entitlement to remain in the EU. But in this connection, a further argument was advanced.
It arose from a case known as the Chen case. The Chens were/are a wealthy Hong Kong family and Ms Chen decided to go to London for the birth of her child. While there, someone advised her it would be a good idea to have the child in Belfast for, thereby, the child would have an entitlement to Irish citizenship, being born on the island of Ireland.
The child was born, Ms Chen demanded a right to remain with her child in the UK for, being an Irish citizen, the child was entitled to remain in the UK under EU law. The case went to the European Court of Justice and there, in a preliminary ruling, the Advocate General found in favour of Ms Chen and this finding was announced during the course of the citizenship campaign.
It added grist to the mill of the proponents of the referendum. Here, manifestly, was a huge "loophole", with implications not just for Ireland but for the whole of the EU. It was in this context that it was said our EU partners were alarmed.
Well, if they were alarmed, it was because they had not bothered to read the opinion of the Advocate General for he had made it clear that any such entitlement on the part of Ms Chen to remain in the UK with her Irish citizen child was conditional on not being a "burden" on the State, that she could pay her own way and would not be dependent on the State for social welfare or any other provision.
Clearly, while this was so in the case of Ms Chen, it palpably was not so in relation to the foreigners that cause alarm to our EU partners, ie indigent Africans. So this second argument was also bogus.
The carry-on, incidentally, about the "emergency" in the maternity hospitals was a piece of nonsense also. The figures produced by the Department of Justice itself in relation to asylum applications by pregnant women had been dropping steadily from 282 in January 2003 to 79 in December 2003.
There were problems to do with deliveries to asylum-seeking women in maternity hospitals but this had nothing to do with pregnant women coming here to avail of any "loophole", it had to do with the nonsensical asylum arrangements of the Department of Justice itself. But all that is an aside.
Robinson was entirely right to revive the controversy over that shameful referendum, which represented perhaps the low point in Irish public life.