Justice Catherine McGuinness said the Minister’s stated need to protect the integrity of Ireland’s asylum and immigration systems was not, on its own, a sufficiently grave and substantial reason to justify deporting the non-national parents of Irish-born children.
Her judgment, delivered in the Supreme Court on 23 January 2003, concerned appeals by the Lobe and Osayande families. They had sought judicial review to prevent deportation. The High Court refused their requested relief on 12 April 2002, and they appealed. McGuinness said she agreed with Justice Fennelly’s reasoning and conclusions and would allow the appeals.
The Minister accepted that the two children born in Ireland were Irish citizens and could not themselves be made subject to deportation orders. The families argued that the children’s citizenship and constitutional rights to family life and education weighed against deporting their parents. The Minister relied on the families’ short time in Ireland, the Dublin Convention, the need to maintain the asylum and immigration systems and, in the Lobe case, the family’s adaptability to life in the Czech Republic. The Minister also argued that the children’s lives would not be endangered if they returned to the United Kingdom.
McGuinness reviewed the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in Fajujonu, which required grave and substantial reasons connected to the common good before a family with Irish-citizen children could be removed. She rejected the argument that the present appeals could be distinguished simply because these families had spent less time in Ireland and each had one Irish-born child. She also considered the immigration-system rationale too general: the Minister needed specific evidence of a danger to the common good related to the parents, as individuals or as members of a group.
She concluded that the general rationale, as framed in the Minister’s decision, was not proportionate to its effect on the families’ constitutional rights. Her judgment states that she would allow the appeals. The extract is McGuinness J.’s judgment; it does not set out the final orders of the Court as a whole.