Opinion

Jim Gibney: Thank you Emma and Jake for leading Irish identity fight

Emma DeSouza with her husband Jake. Picture by Hugh Russell
Emma DeSouza with her husband Jake. Picture by Hugh Russell Emma DeSouza with her husband Jake. Picture by Hugh Russell

IT WAS love at first sight – a chance encounter – in a bar in downtown Los Angeles, over 5,000 miles from her Magherafelt home, where Emma DeSouza met her husband-to-be Jake.

The encounter proved the age-old adage that love blossoms when least expected. The pair were bookends to a putative romance between Emma’s life-long friend Shauna and Jake’s life-long friend Julian.

But Cupid had other ideas that day and as the quartet broke up it was eye contact between Emma and Jake that moved the transatlantic fleeting encounter on to a new plane and ultimately to a new but unusually challenging life for the young couple.

For Emma, 5,000 miles was a stroll. She was a travel enthusiast: Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Poland, the United States, Thailand and New Zealand, on an impulse, home for two years.

But Emma was, unknown to her, not just banking up sights of the world – her sense of being Irish was forming in a not uncommon way for travellers, as indeed was her character.

She deliberately chose to travel alone because it pushed her to experience other people’s cultures. She was proud of being Irish and talking about it in a quiet way.

She was also proud of her family. Her mother was Irish, her father British and unionist. Being Irish was as natural as the air Emma breathed in Magherafelt.

Her quiet family life in Castledawson was shockingly interrupted when Emma was eight years old, one 11th of July night, when loyalists attacked her family and forced her mother, grandmother and uncle to flee their homes – in revenge, the family believe, for her grandmother rescuing a young Catholic teenage lad from attack by loyalists.

Emma blamed the attackers, not the unionist or Protestant people. She was casually aware of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and was particularly impressed with its dual identity clause. It fitted in to her sense of her own Irish identity and her father’s British and unionist identity.

Emma did not know then that the GFA and its citizenship clause would play such a big part in her later life with Jake.

Jake’s easygoing and laid-back lifestyle suited Emma and LA. His background was Jewish. He was a professional drummer and artist and they shared a love of dogs.

A visit to Magherafelt convinced him that Ireland was where he and Emma should live, particularly Belfast. It was small, the people were friendlier on the street and he could work in the bars as a drummer. Life was good. And could only get better.

Little did they know it would take five torturous, Kafkaesque years, before they could take a deep breath, hold hands and genuinely say they could now settle down with certainty in Belfast.

The uncertainty began when the British Home Office refused to give them a residency visa to allow Jake to live and work in Belfast. It insisted that Emma was British. That she had to renounce her Britishness to claim her Irish identity as the only route for Jake to get the EU visa.

She refused. She was Irish. The campaign began. She employed a brilliant law firm, MSM Law, to steer the couple through the bureaucratic labyrinth of the immigration courts. Legally covered, she then sought political support and Seanadóir Niall Ó Donnghaile, who I work with, championed her cause, supported by the Irish government, the SDLP, Alliance, Mike Nesbitt of the Ulster Unionist Party and Congressman Richie Neal, among others in the US.

The young couple paid a heavy price for insisting on their Irish citizenship rights. Jake’s passport was impounded by the British Home Office. His grandmother and two great uncles died and he could not attend the funerals; two nephews were born he was a stranger to. He could not work so money was scarce. But their persistence paid off.

The issue became integral to the restoration of the north’s executive. It was restored. The DeSouzas won. Emma’s Irish identity was accepted by the British government, which changed its immigration rules. Jake got the visa.

The victory means if you are Irish or British in the north your identity is secure. The DeSouzas are delighted, but still believe the British government must honour the GFA by incorporating the citizenship clause into its domestic law.

Thank you Emma and Jake – and good luck.