Ireland has massively endorsed its government’s plans to strip African and eastern European children and their parents living in the republic of Irish citizenship.
The electorate appeared on Saturday to have backed the removal of the right of parents of Irish-born children to become citizens.
Anti-racist campaigners said the vote in the referendum to amend the Irish Constitution shattered the notion that Ireland is a liberal, tolerant nation.
Exit polls predicted that 76% of those who voted supported the removal of citizenship for foreign parents of children born on the island of Ireland. Welfare workers campaigning for immigrants’ rights said the actual yes vote could be well more than 80%.
Roseanna Flynn, of the Campaign against the Racist Referendum, said it was a ”depressing, dangerous day”.
”The government put out false figures about black women giving birth in Dublin’s hospitals,” she said. ”The lie stuck and I fear by stoking the race issue, the number of racist attacks will massively increase.”
Joe Costello, the Irish Labour Party’s justice spokesperson, said: ”The Irish were the great travellers of the world for centuries. Many of our people were illegal immigrants and we campaigned to have those people treated well in countries like America and Britain.
”This vote shows we are two-faced when it comes to immigrants to our country. I am disappointed and sad.”
The Dublin government has insisted the referendum was not racially motivated and would simply close a loophole in the citizenship laws, bringing Ireland into line with the rest of the European Union.
The vote overturns a European Court of Justice ruling in May that parents of children born anywhere in Ireland could become Irish citizens.
It also marks a renegotiation for the Good Friday Agreement, the peace deal hammered out between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland six years ago. The right to citizenship came about as a result of the agreement.
Nationalist politicians in Northern Ireland warned that the constitutional amendment would hand a propaganda victory to hardline unionists. Those unionists opposed to the agreement can now argue with some justification that the peace deal can be rewritten.
Mark Durkan, leader of the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, said: ”This vote will only convince Ian Paisley and his supporters that the Good Friday Agreement can be altered. This is what we were warning about.”
Shortly after the referendum was announced at the beginning of the year, Irish Justice Minister Michael McDowell published figures apparently showing that there were more foreign women giving birth in Dublin’s two maternity hospitals than Irish women. The government argued that this had come about because parents knew about the clause in the Good Friday Agreement that allowed them and their newborns to take up Irish citizenship. However, doctors pointed out that many of the non-Irish women were EU nationals living legally in the republic.
The numbers of asylum seekers in the republic has actually fallen sharply in the last 18 months, according to the United Nations.
The referendum was timed to coincide with the European and local elections in the republic. Opposition politicians had accused the ruling Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrats coalition of trying to whip up xenophobic fears to shore up an unpopular government. The timing appears not to have worked, however, with the two government parties losing heavily to smaller parties.
The posters of the no campaign were still hanging in Dublin on Saturday.
”’No dogs, no blacks, no Irish’: remember this, vote No,” one read.
The sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of the immigrants who experienced that kind of hostility in London, Birmingham and Manchester last week chose to ignore the message. — Guardian Unlimited Â