Graham Finlay

Citizenship Matters: Lessons from the Irish Citizenship Referendum

In 2004, by constitutional referendum, Ireland revoked the automatic right to citizenship by territorial birth (jus soli). This event is of great significance in Europe, where consequently there is no longer a single nation that grants unrestricted territorial birthright citizenship to people born within its borders, and also represents a trend toward the revocation of jus soli within nations governed by the common law tradition. But the Irish Citizenship Referendum also invites comparative analysis with the United States, where jus soli is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, due both to the historical and contemporary links between the two nations and the presence of contemporary pressures to undermine jus soli in the United States that are similar to those that resulted in the Irish Citizenship Referendum. In this article, we discuss both the importance of U.S. practice for the normative discussions surrounding the removal of jus soli as an automatic qualification for citizenship in Ireland, and the importance of the Irish debates as an example for the historical and normative investigation of the foundations of citizenship in the United States, especially in the field of American studies. In particular, we propose that the Irish Citizenship Referendum illuminates the need to reconsider the relationship between restrictionism in immigration and in citizenship, often cast in American Studies as a direct relationship. The Irish case shows that a successful campaign for limits on access to citizenship was made in the absence of policies limiting immigration. One of the purposes and effects of citizenship restriction in a context of increased immigration, we propose, is the creation of a dual and unequal workforce. For this reason, we argue that the elimination of jus soli as a basis for citizenship was unjustified in the Irish case, despite the popular pressures on Irish politicians, and that the pressure being placed on U.S. politicians to undermine jus soli should be consciously resisted.

Comprehensive Liberalism and Civic Education in the Republic of Ireland

Abstract Civic education has become an important issue in the Republic of Ireland. The new pluralism of Irish life, the encouragement of active citizenship by the government and the proposals for a new Leaving Certificate subject in civic education all require a number of difficult normative and institutional choices to be made. Although the direct inculcation of particular values characterises most of these proposals, I argue that such attempts to directly form students’ characters are ill‐suited to a diverse, liberal polity and explore the consequences of a comprehensive Millian liberalism for the civic education curriculum and the structure of schooling in contemporary Ireland. I conclude that Ireland’s educational institutions are peculiarly capable of responding to the diversity of a modern liberal society.

John Stuart Mill as a Theorist of Toleration

John Stuart Mill has not featured as prominently as one might expect in discussions of diversity and toleration, even as the author of On Liberty 1 There may be various reasons for this neglect. One reason may be the more general belief that utilitarianism is inherently unable to cope with these problems, presumably because any account of them in terms of utility seems to deny that they are problems at all, to deny that differences between the conceptions of the good held by competing groups resist translation into a common utilitarian calculus. This perceived inability on the part of utilitarianism is bolstered by the classical objection that utilitarianism does not offer sufficient guarantees that individuals or minorities will not be sacrificed to the majority’s well being whenever that sacrifice leads to greater general good. That utilitarians are insensitive to the interests of minorities is also coupled with the charge that utilitarian policy-makers are insensitive to their subjects’ beliefs; that the historic relations between utilitarianism and colonialism help explain a pernicious ‘Government House Utilitarianism’ (one might say ‘India House Utilitarianism’), where a utilitarian elite sharply distinguish between the demands of the utilitarian theory of the rulers and the committed practices of the ruled.2 Another reason for the specific exclusion of On Liberty from recent discussions of toleration may stem from the increasing emphasis on groups, rather than individuals, as the objects of toleration. Mill’s individualism, as classically expressed in On Liberty, may seem inadequate to deal with the problems of ‘multiculturalism’ and the situation of individuals in groups that provide them with their ‘conceptions of the good’.