Babies, bodies and entitlement: Gendered aspects of access to citizenship in the republic of Ireland

Parliamentary Affairs

Volumn 60, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 437-451

  Garner, Steve ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34547741066     PISSN: 00312290     EISSN: 14602482     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pa/gsm017     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Migration into Ireland has increased spectacularly since the early 1990s. It became a net importer of people in 1.9.96, and a peak of over 47,000 work permits were issued to non-EU nationals in 2003. Much of the incoming cohort was accounted for by returning emigrants, who, until 2002, comprised at least half. Economic growth consistently outstripped the EU average since 1994, although it has slowed since 2002, the major areas of expansion being pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and computers.
2. This is mentioned because the judges in the 2003 Supreme Court ruling make explicit reference to the changed context impacting on their decision to back the Justice Minister's move to deport non-national asylum-seekers with children born in Ireland.
3. R. Lentin and R. McVeigh (eds.) Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland, Beyond the Pale, 2002;
4. B. Fanning, Racism and Social Change the Republic of Ireland Manchester University Press, 2002;
5. S. Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience, Pluto, 2003.
6. The Act's routes to citizenship were birth on the island of Ireland, post-nuptial naturalisation, naturalisation through residence, birth abroad to one Irish parent and descent through at least one grandparent born in Ireland.
7. A. Beesley, 'Alarming' Rise in HIV Cases in Maternity Care' Irish Times, 28 May 2004.
8. F. Bowers, 'Referendum to Deal with 'baby tourists" Irish Health, 11 March 2004;
9. RTE 'Hospital masters deny citizenship law call' RTE News, 13 March 2004. http://www.rte.ie/news/2004/0313/citizenship.html.
10. P. Kennedy and J. Murphy-Lawless, 'The Maternity Care Needs of Refugee and Asylum Seeking Women in Ireland', Feminist Review 73, 2003, pp. 39-53.
11. N. Snuggs, 'Martin promotes medical cultural diversity report', Irish Times, 25 March 2002.
12. National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism/Irish Health Service Management Institute, Cultural Diversity in the Healthcare Sector: Towards the Development of Policy and Practice Guidelines for Organisations in the Health Service, NCCRI/IHSMI, 2002, pp. 12-14.
13. Speech at the Smurfit Business School, 'Debate on the Citizenship Referendum', 31 May 2004.
14. Refugee Council, Refugee Council Briefing on the Common European Asylum System, Refugee Council, March 2004.
15. For a good summary of such arguments, see C. Muller-Hoff, 'Representations of Refugee Women: Legal Discourse in Europe' Law Social Justice & Global Development, 2001. http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/global/ issue/2001-1/mullerhoff1.html.
16. European. Court of Justice. Chen judgement (Case C-200/02: http://cu.ria.eu.int/jurisp/cgi-bin/form.pl?lang=en) October 2004.
17. Speech by the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Michael McDowell, on Private Members Motion in Seanad Éireann on 7 March 2004. The theme was repeated, e.g. in his speech at the launch of the Progressive Democrats' referendum campaign, on 25 May 2004, and in his Irish Times article, 'Yes', on 13 June 2004.
18. R. Lentin, 'Pregnant Silence: (En)gendering Ireland's Asylum Space' Patterns of Prejudice, September 2003; Kennedy and Murphy-Lawless, 'The Maternity Care Needs of Refugee and Asylum, Seeking Women in Ireland', 2003.
19. An example worth looking at is a 1998 article in the Sunday Tribune, which epitomises the amalgamation of trafficking, citizenship and welfare abuse (Garner, 2003, p. 178).
20. Eithne Lubhéid ('Childbearing against the state? Asylum seeker women in the Irish republic' Women's Studies International Forum, 2004) links a number of popular sources of discourse to show how this connection gathered momentum around the referendum.
21. Summary of attitudinal surveys in Garner, 2003, pp. 59-66; National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, Incidents Relating to Racism Reported to the NCCRI, NCCRI (6-monthly reports downloadable from http://www.nccri.ie/incidents-reports.html): The Equality Authority's Annual Report is downloadable from http://www.equality.ie/.
22. European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, Attitudes Towards Minority Groups in the European Union: a special Analysis of the Eurobarometer 2000 Survey, EUMC, 2001;
23. Amnesty International Ireland, Racism in Ireland: the Views of Black and Ethnic Minorities, 2001.
24. A phrase much used by the 'Yes' campaign. Yet, none of the Northern, Ireland parties - which had negotiated the Good Friday-Belfast Agreement referred to - endorsed the referendum, with the SDLP and more forcefully Sinn Féin, which has six deputies in the Republic's Dáil (parliament), condemning it as 'racist'. Cf. 'Sinn, Féin, will campaign against citizenship referendum', Republican News, 18 April 2004;
25. Mitchel McLaughlin's speech at the press conference launching Sinn Féin's 'No' campaign, 21 May 2004; 'Citizenship Referendum will enshrine inequality within the Constitution - Mary Lou McDonald' Republican News, 31 May 2004, inter alia.
26. See F. Anthias and N. Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle, Routledge, 1992;
27. D. Zarkov, 'Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred in the Former Yugoslavia' in H. Lutz, A. Phoenix, and N, Yuval-Davis (eds.) Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe, Pluto, 1995;
28. E. Camiscioli, 'Producing Citizens, Reproducing the 'French Race': Immigration, Demography and Pronatalism in Early Twentieth-Century France', Gender & History November 2001;
29. E. Kofman, A. Phizacklea, P. Raghuram and R. Sales, Gender and International Migration in Europe: Employment, Welfare and Politics, Routledge, 2000;
30. J. Andall, (ed.) Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Europe, Berg, 2003;
31. Feminist Review 2003 (special issue on asylum and exile).
32. R. Lentin, 'Pregnant Silence'.
33. A. Smyth (ed.) The Abortion Papers, Attic Press, 1992;
34. L. Oaks, 'Irishness, Eurocitizens and Reproductive Rights' in H. Ragoné and S. Franklin, Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998;
35. B. Gilheany, 'The State and the Discursive Construction of Abortion' in V. Randall and G. Waylen (eds.), Gender, Politics and the State, Routledge, 1998.
36. L. Smyth, Abortion and Nation: the Politics of Reproduction in Contemporary Ireland, Ashgate, 2005.
37. Smyth, Abortion and Nation, p. 145.
38. Barrett also authored The National Way Forward, The Guild Press, 2003, and has documented links with far right Forza Nuova and the 'Third Position' international fascist movement.
39. For the American eugenics variant see A. Davis, Women, Race and Class, Women's Press, 2000;
40. For the Nazis see R. Mühlhäuser, 'Contingent Regulations: Nazi Sexual Politics of Race in the Occupied, Territories of the Soviet Union, 1941-1945' in A. Lentin and R. Lentin (eds.), Race and State, Cambridge Scholar's Press, 2006, pp. 121-36.
41. M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the USA: from the 1960s to the 1980s, Routledge, 1994, p. 82.
42. Statistics are accessible at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment website http://www.entemp.ie/labour/workpermits/publications. htm#publications.
43. N. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, Routledge, 2000, pp. 24-9.
44. C. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Harvard, University Press, 1989;
45. C. Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory Stanford University Press, 1990;
46. V. Randall and G. Waylen, Gender, Politics and the State, 1998;
47. R. Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, Palgrave, 2003.
48. N. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, p. 79.
49. A. Halkias, 'Money, God and Race: The Politics of Reproduction and the Nation in Modern Greece' European Journal of Women's Studies, May 2003. Quotes from p. 224 and 225.
50. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 219.
51. M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the USA.
52. Benhabib, The Rights of Others, p. 206.
53. R. Lentin, 'From Racial State to Racist State: Ireland on the Eve of the Citizenship Referendum', Variant, Summer 2004.
54. Translation 'Irish Nationality Must Be Earned!' The French original, 'la nationalité française ça se mérite!' was a slogan used by the Front national in the 1980s.
55. S. Garner and A. Moran, 'Asylum and the Nation-State: Putting the 'Order' Back into 'Borders' in Australia and the Republic of Ireland' in Lentin and Lentin (eds.), Race and State, 2006, pp. 101-20.
56. E. Lubhéid, 'Childbearing Against the State?', pp. 344-5.
57. Work that intersects with this topic in the context of the colonial State can be readily identified; G. Steinmetz, 'Precoloniality and Colonial Subjectivity: Ethnographic Discourse and Native Policy in German Overseas Imperialism, 1780-1914' in, D. Davis (ed.) Political Power and Social Theory, vol. 15,1998;
58. A-L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, University of California Press, 2002;
59. S. Garner, Guyana, 1838-1945: Ethnicity, Class and Gender Ian Randle Press, 2007. Yet, while broadly thematically congruent, this research remains to be brought to bear on the issue of citizenship, the State and migration into the developed economies.
60. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, 1998.
61. Cf. Caroline Brettell's subtle treatment of Portuguese women migrants in Paris: 'Women are Migrants too: a Portuguese Perspective', in C. Brettell, Anthropology and Migration: Essays on Transnationalism, Ethnicity and Identity, Alta Mira Press, 2003.