Fintan O'Toole: Living in Milwaukee with a Mayo granny automatically makes you Irish. Living here doesn’t

Last year, I did an event at the Borris Festival in Co Carlow with the great South African artist William Kentridge. When I was chatting to him offstage, two things emerged. One was that he has been an Irish citizen for more than 40 years. The other is that this was his first time ever to set foot on the island. There is nothing remotely wrong with this. Kentridge got his Irish passport through his wife’s ancestry. He wanted it because his family was heavily involved in the struggle against apartheid: his father Sydney was the defence lawyer for Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Steve Biko. The Irish passport afforded at least a modicum of protection against a vicious regime.Shortly after John le Carré died, his son Nick sent me one of the last photographs of his father, taken in October 2020. The quintessential English novelist is wrapped from the neck down in a flag. It is the green, white and orange tricolour of the country to which, in his late 80s, he chose to belong, the Republic of Ireland. He acquired his citizenship through his mother’s birth in Co Cork.Last week, Minister for Justice, Home Affairs and Migration Jim O’Callaghan got Cabinet approval to draft “priority” legislation raising the residency requirement for people living and working here to become naturalised citizens from five to eight years. READ MOREMaking this an official “priority” means the Government believes it is addressing an urgent problem. But it is unable to tell us what the problem is. Or where the logic lies in having two routes to citizenship, one of which is to be made much harder while the other remains very easy. If you live and work and pay taxes here, there’s an ever-tougher obstacle course. But if you’re Irish in a vaguely genetic sense, come into the parlour, there’s a welcome here for you.Actually, there is a logic and it is implicitly racist. I don’t believe there is any deliberate intention to divide access to citizenship on racial grounds. But that is the effect of what O’Callaghan is doing. Citizenship is a right for those who have “Irish blood”, a grudgingly granted privilege for those who don’t. Let’s suppose for the moment that the Government really does believe it urgently necessary to bring down the number of people who are gaining Irish citizenship every year. The first thing it would then do is look at the actual numbers. In 2025, almost 25,000 people living here were naturalised as Irish citizens. In the same year, according to the figures supplied by the Department of Foreign Affairs to the ancestry service creeore.com, 54,097 people applied for Irish citizenship through what’s called the Foreign Births Register.This is the channel for those who have even one grandparent born on the island of Ireland or even one parent who was an Irish citizen. If you meet these criteria, you are entitled to citizenship even if you have no intention of ever visiting Ireland and even if your parent who was a citizen had themselves never set foot on the island. [ It’s easy to look tough on immigration. It’s much harder to build empathyOpens in new window ]So, we have twice as many new citizens coming through the channel that demands no actual connection to Ireland than we have coming through the channel that currently requires five years of living and working here. And it’s the first of these cohorts that is rising most rapidly: the number of Americans seeking Irish citizenship through ancestry jumped 63 per cent last year alone.But we have not yet reached the height of absurdity. The rise in ancestry-based citizenship is not accidental: it is Government policy. Ireland actively encourages tens of millions of people of Irish ancestry (especially those in the US) to see if they can become citizens. The publication of the 1926 Census returns, for example, makes it much easier for them to establish the birthplaces of their grandparents.So: if you have lived all your life in Milwaukee but your granny left Mayo in 1930, Irish citizenship is yours for the asking. If you’re caring for patients in an Irish hospital since you arrived here from India in 2020, the Government wants you to know that citizenship may or may not be granted, reluctantly and with bad grace, in 2028. What are we saying here about Irishness? That the Milwaukee man is “really” Irish while the Indian-born woman is “really” not Irish. One person belongs to “us” regardless of any real-life connection to the island. The other does not belong in spite of making her life here.And, whatever the intention, this is about race. The overwhelming majority of those who acquire citizenship through ancestry are white people from Britain, the US, Canada and Australia. Conversely, by far the largest cohort of people who gain citizenship through residency are Indian-born. Once you decide to make it easy for people of “Irish blood” and ever harder for non-white migrants, you are creating a racially discriminatory system. This may be an unintended consequence but it’s also a starkly obvious reality – and one that every Irish person should find repugnant.[ New rules for Irish citizenship: How will they work?Opens in new window ]Again: what problem is being addressed here? There is none. No harm is done to Ireland by our very open system of granting passports to those of Irish heritage. The State promotes it as a good thing – it makes more people feel connected to Ireland. How, then, can harm be done by doing the same for those who are making vital contributions to Irish society every day? None of this is truly about citizenship. It’s about O’Callaghan projecting himself as a future leader by looking tough on immigration. He’s throwing shapes – at the expense of decent people and families who are already part of the fabric of Irish life. This is not just futile – it’s toxic for our democracy. Centre-right parties throughout Europe have travelled this road of legitimising anti-immigrant tropes and trying to look harder than the hard right. You don’t need a John le Carré mastermind to see how that’s working out.