The politics of belonging in contemporary Ireland and Direct Provision

This article examines how the Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution Act 2004, by limiting jus soli, redefined membership and legitimised differentiated governance of migrants through Direct Provision. Reading constitutional text, party campaign literature, parliamentary debate, and administrative arrangements alongside scholarship on belonging and necropolitics, it argues that Direct Provision is the administrative realisation of the referendum's distinction between citizen and non-citizen. Direct Provision regulates residence through dispersal and extended administrative delay, instituting suspended status as the ordinary condition of protection. The paper situates this regime within Irish nationalist inheritance and argues that far-right actors since 2019 mobilise the 2004 amendment's citizen/non-citizen distinction to structure debates on welfare and housing, securing political traction through reiteration of constitutional exclusion.