Contrary to what some people assert, there is nothing racist in Ireland’s law of nationality and citizenship. When the independent Irish State was created in 1922, its Constitution provided at Article 3 that the citizens of the Irish Free State were those born in Ireland or either of whose parents was born in Ireland, or who had then been ordinarily resident in the jurisdiction of the Irish Free State for not less than seven years. Citizenship by descent is not racist. It simply entitles some people of recent Irish parentage or grandparentage to be regarded as Irish citizens.

The 1937 Constitution is the basic law of a nation state. Article 1 of Bunreacht na hÉireann affirms the “inalienable, indefeasible and sovereign right” of the “Irish nation” to choose independently “its own form of government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural in accordance with its own genius and traditions”.

There is a fundamental difference between residence and nationality. Irish citizenship is a status of nationality. Residence is not. Citizenship is not merely an enhanced class of residence rights.

Article 9 of the Constitution lays down that “(f)idelity to the nation and loyalty to the State are fundamental political duties of all citizens”. Only those born into the Irish nation or who seek to become part of the Irish nation by naturalisation enjoy the full constitutional rights accorded to........

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