Sir, - The essentially reactionary nature of the Southern case against the Belfast Agreement was dramatically illustrated by one clause in the referendum advertisement (May 15th): "The new Article 2 will give a constitutional right of citizenship to anyone born in Ireland. This will make it very difficult to change the laws on citizenship and it may prevent the enactment of necessary laws to regulate immigration" (my italics).
What can this mean? First, it criticises the fact that children of refugees and EU nationals born in the Republic would be Irish citizens as of constitutional right. This, of course, is standard Western practice - as in the US where all children born in the country, including the children of Irish illegals, are automatic citizens.
Second, it implicitly opposes the principle that a class of children born in the North should now receive Irish citizenship. These are the children not only of refugees and continental EU nationals domiciled in the North, but of British citizens living there who either were not born on the Island of Ireland or who lack Irish ancestry as defined by the Republic's current citizenship acts (e.g. a child of Scots parents without Irish ancestry). Moreover, read especially into this second implication the following: British citizens of swarthy complexion (i.e. immigrants to Britain without Irish ancestry), whose Northern-born children could now be Irish citizens. Dread prospect! In short, the old criterion for Irish citizenship at birth in the North - essentially that you have one ancestor born in pre-1992 Ireland - is nullified, replaced by a more modern and progressive principle.
What, then, is the Irish nation? I would say it exists in two tenses; the present and the optative. It must encompass both the people who now are legally part of the nation and those who, legally, can become so. This optative offer of citizenship is extended not only to the persecuted who make it to our shores, but to the unionists of Northern Ireland. In the case of both groups the legal offer is theirs, and theirs alone, to accept or reject. But the nation, the sum of its parts, will change fundamentally to the degree it is accepted.
Hence, in true Wolfe Tone fashion, the Irish nation is not ultimately a matter of ethnicity, but simply a common citizenship under a republic - that is, of the rule of law administered by the Irish State. This holds true even if, at the inception of the State, the definition of "the Irish nation" was essentially a matter of enthnicity rather than citizenship. That, however, is the past tense of the nation: we are now the present, where the rule of law makes manifest in the evolving optative. Nationhood as a function of ethnicity: that is not only the essence of the Northern tragedy, but also of the catastrophe that befell Bosnia. Ethnic essentialism is the forerunner of all extreme and baroque forms of racialism, and arguably the greatest of the century's political plagues. As that modern Swift, Hubert Butler, wrote of Thomas Davis, whose father was English, and whose nationalism was of the civic, anti-ethnic variety: "He would have said that a nation belongs to the people who were born in it and intend to die there and who make its welfare their chief concern."
Now we might say simply that a nation fits its citizens - rather than vice versa. Is it not far past time, indeed, for an altogether new republicanism? - Yours, etc., Chris Agee,
Belfast.