February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
And almost 50,000 Irish born citizens would agree.
The man behind the Morrison Visa program of a decade ago has lately become embroiled in the passionate debate on the nature of Irish citizenship, one that will be decided by Irish voters in a June 11 referendum.
Morrison, through his company, the Maryland-based Morrison Public Affairs Group, was already advising the Immigrant Council of Ireland before the referendum debate sprang up.
The ICI is an immigrant advocacy group and it opposes the government’s bid to alter the Irish Constitution in a way that would make it far more difficult for non-Irish citizens to secure Irish citizenship for their children born in the state.
Not surprisingly, Morrison’s view on the proposed amendment has been sought out by the Irish media. He has been interviewed a number of times and is this week busy penning op-ed pieces on the referendum for both the Irish Times and Irish Examiner newspapers.
“I’m making a nuisance of myself,” Morrison joked in a phone interview. “But I think it is a terrible idea what they [the government] are doing. We’ve had five different explanations in the last month.”
The former Connecticut congressman said that he was only speaking for himself but that he had also been working with the ICI in recent months in an attempt to put together a program of workable immigration policies that he thinks Ireland badly needs.
The Republic, largely due to the economic prosperity grounded in the Celtic Tiger, became a country of immigrants in the late 1990s after centuries of being seen as one of large-scale emigration.
And few dispute that Ireland now needs immigrant workers. Demographic studies indicate that Ireland is beginning to follow the rest of Western Europe with regard to falling birth rates and an aging population.
“In Ireland, figures from the Central Statistics Office confirm that the average Irish family is shrinking. Irish women are having children later in life, and they’re having fewer of them,” the Dublin-published Sunday Business Post reported last weekend.
“It’s not an exaggeration, the demographic time bomb is very much here,” economist Finola Kennedy told the paper.
It is against this backdrop that the upcoming referendum is set to take place.
The government, comprising of Fianna F