The High Court has dismissed a judicial review application by a couple seeking to have their residence in Ireland treated as lawful from the birth of their eldest child, an Irish citizen. The parents argued that this would make the residence reckonable towards Irish citizenship for their twin children, who were born in 2005.
Mr Justice Mac Eochaidh delivered the judgment on 15 January 2015. He rejected the applicants’ argument that the EU Court of Justice’s ruling in *Ruiz Zambrano* automatically gave non-EU parents of EU citizen children a right to reside and work, including retrospectively.
The parents, who were from Pakistan, had arrived in Ireland in 2001 and 2002. Their eldest child was born on 5 May 2002 and was an Irish citizen under the birth citizenship rules then in force. The parents applied for residence permission in June 2002, but no decision was made on that application. They received permission to remain under the IBC/05 scheme in July 2005. Their twins had been born the previous month.
The twins’ applications for Irish passports were refused because the parents did not have the required three years of reckonable residence in the four years before the twins’ birth. In an earlier judgment in the same proceedings, the court had already held that the parents’ residence from 13 February 2004 to 30 June 2005 was not reckonable, because they had no permission to remain during that period.
The applicants submitted that *Zambrano* required the State to recognise their residence from the eldest child’s birth. They said the child’s EU citizenship gave the parents derived residence rights, and that those rights should be recognised when assessing their historical residence. The State argued that any such right depended on the family’s circumstances and required an assessment and permission from the authorities; it was not automatic on a child’s birth.
The judge said *Zambrano* did not establish automatic residence rights for parents of EU citizen children. EU law could prevent a refusal of residence permission where that refusal would force a dependent EU citizen child to leave the Union, but whether that condition was met required consideration of the circumstances.
The judgment left open that Ireland might, in some circumstances, have to acknowledge parents’ lawful residence retrospectively from a child’s birth. But the applicants had advanced no facts or argument showing that the parents’ historic lack of permission had impaired their child’s EU citizenship rights. The court therefore rejected their claim that they had been lawfully resident from the child’s birth and dismissed the application.
The ruling addressed the remaining issue in the judicial review. It did not grant residence permission or citizenship to any applicant.