Go back where you came from

A curious collision of two different feeds occurred the day after my birthday. Over the last few years, I have slumped into a ritual of checking the headlines from RTE every day before breakfast. You may imagine that, as a protestant with a very expensive education, a cold bath before breakfast would be more my (bracing) style. I did try a cold bath once or twice in my youth in the sense of try anything once except morris-dancing and incest [whc quote prev]. But as a habit, it never took. 

So the RTE headline which arrested my attention was Law to strip citizenship to be enacted before Dáil summer break. Helen McEntee the FG Minister of Justice, is presumably bringing this before cabinet for their appro as a way of garnering a headline now, followed by some extra votes from her Othering constituency come the next election. This lamentable thin-end of a wedge is presumably informed by the sorry case of Shamima Begum a Brit who left school and country at 15 to support the Islamic State in Syria. Shamima got married out there, had three children who died, and returned home chastened, not to say battered, by a series of unfortunate events / choices. The UK passed the Nationality and Borders Act in 2022, so facilitate the ejection of undesirables.  The Act allows the Home Secretary to revoke citizenship if the 'perp' is eligible for some other citizenship. According to a UK Tribunal, Bangladesh, whence Shamima's parents came, would allow Begum to apply for citizenship through them. According the Bangladesh, that is just not true (and they don't want her).

The other feed-floater which crashed up against The Minister's certainties was a quote from celebrity US film critic Roger Ebert (18Jun1942 - 04Apr2013) [bloboprev]  "The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?" 

Ahem, quite so! Even without this new strip-citz legislation, I have been invited by a forty-shades-of-green-washing colleague to "Go back where you came from" when I shared that my ancestors were horse-riding protestants. One of the delights of my boring Anglo patriarchal existence is the ethnic diversity of my acquired family - adding French, Lebanese, Toubou, Punjabi spices to my Scots, Irish, Welsh stodge. Presumably The Minister, confident that her new law would only be applied in very limited circumstances cannot imagine circumstances where members of my family will be Nakba-ed out of their right to remain because they failed a freckle count.

A civilized society
works on / with / for its hard cases
it doesn't kill expel them

Don't forget Martin Niemöller: Zuerst kamen sie . . . When they came for the socialists etc. bloody etc.