What comes with an Irish passport?

The general and essentially reasonable perception is that citizenship of a nation grants a person certain protections and privileges.
This is the theory at least and for this reason people strive and yearn to be granted the status of citizen in certain nations where life is perceived as being better, safer and imbued with more benefits.
Ireland is just such a nation. It is clear that our institutions, citizens and policy makers hold citizenship in very high esteem, judging from how jealously they guard it from those who wish to acquire it. During the years of the Celtic Tiger, when the economy spiralled to dizzy heights of excess, the concept of fortress Ireland was born.
Refugees and asylum seekers were corralled in hostels and camps, forced to live on practically nothing and generally mistreated by the system, while the vast majority of them had their applications rejected. Even this shameful process was carried out grudgingly and only because Ireland was forced to because of its obligations under the United Nations Convention on Human Rights.
Post economic meltdown, the attitude of the Irish to those wishing to come and gain citizenship has hardened anew. Now the reasons cited for xenophobia are more likely to revolve around the lack of opportunity for the people already on the island. It can be summed up in the phrase, “we don’t even have enough for ourselves, let alone anyone else that might want to come and live here”.
Among the more shameful chapters in Ireland’s recent history of dealing with those seeking citizenship is the deportation of families with an Irish citizen child. The Department of Justice stated in February that it was not aware of the exact number of parents of Irish citizen children who had been deported. It did state however that 20 Irish citizen children had left the country in the company of their non-citizen parents, who were facing deportation orders, since 2005.
This hardly seems like the kind of protection that a citizen might want or expect and is likely to achieve its goal of gaining Ireland a reputation as a place that is unfriendly to those who wish to enter or try to stay.
In 2004, the automatic right to citizenship of a child born in Ireland was removed and this further reinforced the walls of Fortress Ireland.
It will be interesting to see how the young people leaving Ireland now for America and Australia are received in those countries.
Emigration is now a reality again for thousands of Irish families, who will have to watch their sons and daughters go abroad for work and the chance of a better life. How will they feel if their loved ones are treated abroad as people were treated coming here from the ’90s on? Americans have clamped down mercilessly on immigration in recent years and, as Wikileaked documents showed us, will not be making any exception for the undocumented Irish in their enforcement.
Since March, Ireland has had to reassess its position on the non-citizen parents of citizen children because of the Zambrano Ruling from the European Court of Justice. This stated that the non-EU citizen parents of EU-citizen children must be allowed to live and work in an EU state, so as not to deprive them of the rights of EU citizenship. This ruling led for calls from a number of mothers of Irish citizen children for their deported husbands to be returned to Ireland so that their children could be raised by both parents. Thankfully, this maltreatment of Irish citizen children has been addressed by the Irish government, even if it was only when forced to by the European Courts.
Citizens’ rights and the protection that may or may not come with a passport were on my mind this week because of the publication of the report into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne.
Once again it reveals a litany of abuse, deceit and failure to protect the rights of children. Again we have documented the cover-up of child abuse by the institution in order to protect itself. The same practices we have grown all too accustomed to reading about are there once again.
The major point that marks this new report as extra shocking are the dates when the abuse and subsequent cover-ups were taking place. This was still happening in the late two thousands, after the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and religious had become a much discussed and acknowledged problem. When the church was telling us all that it was now ready to adhere to the laws of the land and protect children, rather than allowing its priests rape and psychologically destroy them through its actions, abuse continued.
In almost all of the cases cited in the Cloyne report I would imagine that the victim was an Irish citizen. So I cannot help but wonder what rights and protections those citizens received from the state while they suffered this abuse?
The politicians and organs of the state, like most of the population at the time, were well aware of the potential threat to children posed by the church as an organisation. Its history of hiding child molesters behind a wall of silence and denial was plain to see and yet the state took this institution’s word for it that a new culture of reporting would come into existence, like a truth mushroom of sorts. This before the fact that the church continued to run the primary schools is even considered. Naivety cannot be rolled out as an excuse in this case. The state had a duty to protect its child citizens from this organisation and the despicable men who lurked within its ranks. It has failed miserably in this duty. 
The citizens of Ireland have not been protected by the state in recent times so it seems strange that anyone would strive to get themselves an Irish passport. Perhaps the acquisition of EU citizenship, along with the Irish, is now the major selling point of the exercise.