Don’t be swayed by Michael McDowell’s scare tactics

SO, if we had passed Michael McDowell’s referendum, we’d have stopped the little baby Chen from becoming an Irish citizen?

And because we haven't passed it yet, we're going to be overrun by thousands, maybe millions, of little babies with yellow skin and names like Chen? Doesn't the Chen judgment, about which we were bombarded all last week, prove that Michael McDowell was right all along?

Not true on any count.

Mind you, that didn't stop Michael McDowell from issuing a statement in the aftermath of the Chen opinion claiming, as usual, total vindication, and quoting the opinion entirely out of context to try, wrongly, to suggest that the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice supported his referendum.

One of the most remarkable features of the Chen case (the baby's name is Catherine, by the way, and she is about four years of age by now) is that even after passage of the referendum, she would have been entitled to full citizenship of Ireland, assuming the Government keeps its promises (always a big assumption, I know).

Why? Because what the Government has said is this. If we vote for the referendum, they're going to bring in a new law on citizenship. And they have already published the bill they're proposing to enact you can read it on the Department of Justice's website.

Section 6 (3) of that proposed new Act says, "A person born in the island of Ireland is an Irish citizen from birth if he or she is not entitled to citizenship of any other country." That section is designed to honour Ireland's international obligations to stateless people.

But when you read the facts of Catherine Chen's case, that is exactly what she is, or would be if she didn't qualify for Irish citizenship.

In paragraph 14 of the opinion from the European Court of Justice, it is made clear that Catherine Chen was not recognised as a national of the United Kingdom. In paragraph 21 it is clear that she is not recognised as a national of China, because China has a one-child rule. (That's one of the reasons that orphanages in China are full of abandoned babies. If Catherine's mother had gone home to China when she discovered she was pregnant, as presumably the supporters of our referendum would have wished, she would have been expected to have an abortion). So even if Catherine were born after the referendum, and after the new law had come into effect, she would still qualify as an Irish citizen because (like many other countries) we offer that protection to stateless persons who are born here.

But assume for a moment that wasn't the case.

Suppose Catherine was the first child of her parents, and could have qualified as a Chinese national. Will there be thousands of other parents from China and elsewhere trying to qualify for free movement throughout Europe by conferring Irish citizenship on their newborn babies? Not if they read the opinion issued by the Advocate General (and if his opinion is upheld by the full European Court of Justice).

He makes it clear that the right to free movement applies to people who have sufficient resources to avoid becoming a burden on the country they are in. Free movement of persons within the European Union is still quite severely limited. It is designed that way to prevent people who live in one country deciding that the social welfare system of another is better than theirs, or moving from country to country to take advantage of, say, free healthcare or third-level education. So the notion that thousands of poor people will arrive in Ireland to have their babies, just so those babies can give them the right to live wherever they like in the European Union, is absurd.

In other words, it's of a piece with some of the earlier scare stories put out by Michael McDowell and the Government, and now quietly abandoned.

Remember how we were told in the beginning that some of the maternity hospitals were being overrun, and that the senior people in those hospitals had pleaded with the Minister for Justice to do something about the law? That was a wild exaggeration. In fact, remarkably, it transpires that most of the pressure being suffered by maternity hospitals is not caused by extra babies, but by Government cutbacks.

There has been a significant drop in the number of births in Ireland in the last 20 years, and a significant drop in the number of nights a mother stays in hospital while having a baby. As a consequence, the number of "birth nights" in Ireland's maternity hospitals has more than halved since 1980.

And yet they are suffering undeniable pressure not caused, as I said, by extra babies at all.

LIKE a lot of previous referendum campaigns, this one is full of scare stories based on untruths. And most of the scare stories are coming from people who are trying to make us afraid. Some day, I suspect, Michael McDowell will regret his role in trying to lead a campaign based on the politics of fear.

Or maybe not. He had a long article in one of the Sunday newspapers the other day on his other favourite subject.

In the course of it he said, "Those of us who are Republican, who know the meaning of the term, must stand by the Republic which we have created... it is not only democratically elected politicians who must stand by the Republic that is also the duty of the other organs of our democracy, particularly our media who have shown that they can be effective and courageous in defence of our democracy when they really want to be. It is a duty also cast on every single citizen who, as a citizen, owes a fundamental political duty of loyalty to the State, a State which has one Army, one police force, one system of justice, one parliament, one Government and which acknowledges one source of political legitimacy the free and democratic sovereign will of the Irish people and the democratic institutions created by, and answerable to, the Irish people."

Coming from Michael McDowell, that has a frightening ring to it.

Fidelity to the nation and loyalty to the State are fundamental political duties of all citizens that's what it says in our Constitution and I believe in it. But that loyalty, in McDowell's terms, must be extended to the "one Government" he sees at the centre of the State.

It couldn't be more wrong, or more dangerous. Governments must earn their loyalty, not demand it. And they must earn it week after week. The last time I looked, this was not just a republic but a democratic one. In a democracy, the most fundamental political right is the right to disagree indeed, the duty to disagree if conscience tells you so.

In the name of that duty, and because of the motivation behind this referendum and the half-truths and distortions used to bolster a moth-eaten case, I say we should profoundly disagree with McDowell's approach. We shouldn't just vote no we should shout it from the rooftops.