Enfranchising Ireland?

Description

The rights and duties associated with the concept of citizenship are a central aspect of the process of identity-building and state formation. This book explores the origin and evolution of the concepts of citizenship and identity in Ireland from a broadly historical perspective, tracing their development in terms of rights and duties, from classical times, through the medieval period and the era partition in Ireland, to the present difficulties surrounding Brexit and the refugee crisis.

Informations

• Publié par: Royal Irish Academy
• Date de parution: 02 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908997869
• Langue: English

Extrait

Enfranchising Ireland? Identity, citizenship and state
Edited by
Steven G. Ellis
Contents
Introduction. Enfranchising Ireland? Identity, citizenship and state
Steven G. Ellis
1. Roman citizenship between law and practice
Catherine Steel
2. Citizenship and the state in Ireland: from medieval lordship to Early Modern kingdom
Steven G. Ellis
3. Concepts of citizenship in Ireland during an era of revolutions, 1688–1798
Mary Ann Lyons
4. Making good citizens: Ireland under the union, 1801–1921
Enda Delaney
5. Constructing citizenships: the Protestant search for place and loyalty in post-independence Ireland
Ian d’Alton
6. Citizenship on the ethnic frontier: nationality, migration and rights in Northern Ireland since 1920
Niall Ó Dochartaigh and Thomas Leahy
7. Citizenship, entitlement and autochthonic political projects of belonging in the age of Brexit
Nira Yuval-Davis and Ulrike M. Vieten
8. Citizenship and immigration: problems of integration in Ireland today
Bryan McMahon
Conclusion. Citizenship and the state in Ireland today
Steven G. Ellis
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the contributors
Index
Introduction.
Enfranchising Ireland? Identity, citizenship and state
Steven G. Ellis
After some years of relative stability, the balance of rights and duties that together make up the modern concept of citizenship has again been called into question, with recent events impinging on the European Union and Ireland’s role in Europe. Political instability in North Africa and in the Middle East has prompted large numbers of migrants and refugees to seek asylum in Europe, chiefly in Greece and Italy in the first instance, but with the intention of moving further north and west within the EU. Faced with this prospect of large-scale uncontrolled immigration, the EU member states, including Ireland, have entered into agreements to take in stated numbers of these refugees, who will in most cases later look to integrate into the host society, to secure permanent residence and to work here, with their status confirmed by grants of citizenship. In many ways, large population movements of this nature are a product of the modern phenomenon of globalisation: over the past 30 years, such developments have in Ireland prompted an increase in the proportion of residents born outside Ireland, from minuscule numbers to a sizeable minority—no less than 17 per cent of the Republic’s population at the last census in 2016. In the United Kingdom, the growing numbers of foreigners hoping to live and work there was also a major influence in the recent vote in favour of Brexit, and the decision of the UK to leave the EU. This in turn now calls into question the present Common Travel Area between Britain and Ireland, as well as threatening a restoration of a ‘hard border’ between Northern Ireland and the Republic which, at the same time, amounts to the creation of a new border between the UK and the EU.
Before Brexit and the present refugee crisis, however, the past two decades had seen initiatives at a European level towards a pooling of citizenship rights whereby something akin to a common European citizenship might in practice have seemed to be emerging. These initiatives centred on the development of common rights of residence and employment across the EU member states. Specifically, the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Amsterdam Treaty (1997) conferred on all nationals of an EU member state a range of ‘European’ rights, analogous to national citizenship rights. These included rights of access to European institutions (parliament, council, the ombudsman, and to vote in European and local elections); rights of free movement, residence and employment; and against discrimination on grounds of nationality. 1 These were all rights that traditionally had been associated with citizenship.
A century earlier, however, in the Europe of competing nation-states, such ‘European’ initiatives had neither been envisaged nor seen as desirable. By and large, the rights and duties of individual national citizenships had begun and ended at the frontiers of the rival states and had also been deliberately set out and developed in an oppositional manner—vis-à-vis the alien, the foreigner, the neighbouring state. The idea of large numbers of foreign nationals from elsewhere in Europe living in another nation-state and enjoying there what are tantamount to citizenship rights is fairly new. It is a consequence of the recent downgrading, or reduction, of the traditional frontiers of Europe’s rival nation-states to the status of internal borders of the EU member states. The change is perhaps best illustrated by the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but in Ireland it was epitomised by the dismantling of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
One reason for these moves in the direction of a common European citizenship is the relative sameness of state law in EU member states in regard to the acquisition and transmission of citizenship, despite minor differences. There is in each case provision for the acquisition of citizenship from parents ( ius sanguinis ), normally through either or both parents and regardless of place of birth, with only minor exceptions. Almost as common is citizenship acquired through birth within the state ( ius soli ), although sometimes with a proviso that the child only acquires citizenship if he/she does not acquire a foreign citizenship through birth. Normally, too, there is provision for the acquisition of citizenship by naturalisation through long residence in the state, commonly five years, or by marriage to a citizen. 2 Looking at the present position here in Ireland, it is clear that citizenship law in both parts of Ireland generally accords with these norms. Behind the relative uniformity of modern citizenship laws across Europe, however, there was in the past considerable variation, if only because the development of individual rights and duties in the various European states had grown up in very different ways. Despite some common roots extending back into antiquity, these various citizenship laws seem generally to have followed two broad patterns of development. On the one hand, there was the concept of the citizen as the enfranchised inhabitant of a particular city, of which ancient Rome is the classic example, and so by extension, the concept of the enfranchised inhabitant of the modern state. On the other hand, there was the idea of the citizen as the privileged subject of a particular prince, and so by extension of his principality, a citizen of the state.
The present volume of essays originated in a conference held at the Royal Irish Academy in October 2016 on the theme ‘Enfranchising Ireland? Identity, citizenship and state’. In most of the contributions the approach has been to look at the evolution of the concept of citizenship in Ireland from a broadly historical perspective, tracing its development in terms of rights and duties from earlier times to the present difficulties surrounding Brexit and the refugee crisis. Ireland was never part of the Roman empire, but the justification for the inclusion of an opening chapter on Roman practices of citizenship was, as Catherine Steel argues in Chapter 1 , its distinctive features among ancient city-states and so its later function as a model within Western political thought. Rome was apparently distinctive both in its development of a concept of citizenship that was seemingly unrelated to biological kinship or ethnic identity, and in its readiness to grant citizenship to non-citizens. Ironically, this is an issue which modern European states, including Ireland, have only recently had to address, notably with the present refugee crisis. The contrast is in any case very apparent here between ancient Rome and the position that had developed in Ireland during the later Middle Ages. In this period, the rights of those we should now describe as citizens (free subjects of the English crown in the lordship of Ireland) were tied to those of English ethnic identity, as Steven Ellis outlines in Chapter 2 , with the indigenous inhabitants in effect classed as aliens in their own land, condemned to ‘Irish servitude’ outside the king’s protection. As, with the completion of the Tudor conquest, English rule was extended to the remaining parts of the island, the status of ‘Irish subjects’ was gradually extended to the native population at the same time as a new religious bar to full citizenship was introduced. By the eighteenth century, a series of new religious tests (the Penal Laws) had been introduced to ensure that members of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland had a monopoly on the full range of rights and liberties commensurate with the privileged status of citizenship. Mary Ann Lyons shows in Chapter 3 , however, that the constitutional status of Irish Catholics was gradually improved in the later eighteenth century through the progressive repeal of the Penal Laws. Thus, briefly in the 1790s there was a prospect of Catholics and Protestants uniting under a common Irish citizenship of civil and political rights and national identity; but with the Act of Union of 1801 this was largely replaced by the goal of building a common citizenship of the new United Kingdom.
In Ireland under the union the focus of the British state switched, so Enda Delaney argues in Chapter 4 , to promoting through the strong hand of law and order a loyal citizenry among those widely assumed, at least initially, to be rebellious subjects and bad citizens. The government aimed to classify and categorise the population by means of royal commissions and censuses to generate statistics; then promote a system of primary education that would advance them to a state of civilisation, cleansed from Irish cultural traits and Catholic superstition, and teach them to be good British citizens. In effect, these policies