‘Penniless Orientals of the Pedlar Type’: The Republic of Ireland and Commonwealth Migrant Rights, 1940s–1970s

Especially as regards Commonwealth restrictions, Ireland's immigration policy has been seen as (surreptitiously) dependent on UK policy. Although the Common Travel Area imposed serious limits, Irish discretion was in fact significant and restrictive. In 1948–9 the United Kingdom secured Ireland's public commitment to extend reciprocal citizenship rights to all the Commonwealth, notwithstanding its secession, but Ireland avoided this vis-à-vis the ‘new’ Commonwealth and left its aliens exemption law deliberately opaque. Whilst broadly mirroring the UK Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, Ireland retained apartheid South Africa as partially privileged and only comprehensively exempted British citizens born within the United Kingdom. From 1973, the United Kingdom largely abandoned any privileged treatment but, in entirely removing this in 1975 and selectively imposing visas from 1976, Ireland went beyond even this. These divergences reflected that, compared to the United Kingdom, it had left an increasingly diverse Commonwealth in 1949 and had a stronger homogenous nationalism.