Minister urged to halt deportations

Last week, CADIC — the Coalition against the Deportation of Irish Children — held a press conference to highlight the need for the rights of Irish children (born here to non-national parents) to be upheld and to call on the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Michael McDowell, to halt deportations.

In addition, an open letter from CADIC to the Minister was endorsed and signed by members of opposition parties, including Sinn Féin's five TDs and by over 70 organisations and individuals, including Mary Robinson.

On 19 February 2003, the Minister for Justice abolished the possibility of non-national parents of Irish children applying for residency in Ireland. This followed a Supreme Court decision in January, which held that non-national parents of Irish-born children did not have an automatic right of residency here.

Immediately, the Department of Justice stopped processing all applications for residency. Many families who had been in the asylum procedure had already been advised to abandon their claims to asylum, assuming they could rely on their application for residency and be entitled to live and raise their children in Ireland. Now these families are having their applications returned to them — unprocessed — and are no longer entitled to free legal advice, adding to their hardship.

Letters, warning of deportation, had been sent to 700 non-national parents of Irish children by October 2003, according to the Irish Human Rights Commission. These recipients are given only 15 days to make representations on why they should not be deported.

CADIC reminded McDowell that all Irish children are equal citizens, irrespective of their parentage. However, currently, children of 11,000 parents, who lawfully applied for residency before February 2003, are at risk of being forced to leave the country of their birth. This, "the Minister's war on immigrants", according to Aengus Ó Snodaigh TD, was "an appalling vista".

Ray Dooley of the Children's Rights Alliance said that "the Government has an obligation to provide that all Irish children's rights to education and basic health-care be respected."

A spokesperson for the Free Legal Advice Centres deemed it likely that there would be legal challenges to the deportations, given Ireland's obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which states: "...in all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions...the best interests of the child shall be the primary consideration."

In the letter to the Minister, CADIC echoed earlier concerns of other human rights groups, including the IHRC, that all Irish children are entitled under the Constitution to be treated as equal citizens of the nation and this should therefore be reflected in the Government's policies on residency for all Irish children and their families. On this basis, they called on the Minister to allow families of Irish children to remain here, rather than criminalise them.