A line jumped out at me – and should jump out at you, too – from the report by Una Mullally in the Irish Times yesterday afternoon about the two Irish pro-Palestinian protestors who have been unceremoniously kicked out of the Federal Republic of Germany for being, well, too vocally pro-Palestinian:
Lawyers for the two Irish citizens are trying to secure court injunctions in an attempt to halt the orders and are appealing the deportations.
Three of the four people subjected to the deportation orders are EU citizens and face having to leave Germany, despite EU citizens being allowed to move freely between EU member states.
The position of the German Government on the right of free movement of EU citizens does not align, it’s fair to say, with the generally accepted views on this question of successive Irish Governments. For many decades in Ireland the effective position is that once you are an EU citizen, you can come and live here, no questions asked. But that is not, and never has been, what the law says. Here is the EU’s understanding of freedom of movement:
In order to stay in another EU country for more than three months, EU citizens have to meet certain conditions depending on their status (for example worker, self-employed, student, etc.) and may be asked to comply with administrative formalities.
EU citizens have the right of permanent residence in another EU country after legally residing there continuously for five years.
We need only look at the case of the two Irish citizens in Germany to see how restricted the right to free movement actually is. As Una Mullally notes, neither of the Irish men who now face deportation from Germany have been convicted of any crimes in Germany, though one of them does face police charges over the use of banned anti-Israeli slogans at one of the marches in which he participated.
In both men’s cases, the reason for deportation appears to be little more than the fact that the German authorities consider them to have been involved in fundamentally anti-German activities, and are deporting them on the basic grounds that they have no right to live in Germany in the first place.
This, needless to say, is simply not something that the Irish state does. The Irish state may, on occasion, invoke the fact that a person has no legal right to be in the state as a grounds for removing them, but that is rarely if ever the sole ground for taking that action. In fact, as Matt Treacy has noted, the Irish state is generally content to allow people to remain here who have no legal right to be here, so long as they have committed no crimes. And even, often times, after they have committed crimes.
Yet the legal position vis a vis EU law is perfectly clear: There is nothing, for example, stopping the Irish state from deporting and removing EU citizens resident here for fewer than five years who have been convicted of crimes – even, for example, lesser crimes like road traffic offences. Further, the state could if it wished go further: The Irish state has no obligation whatsoever to support, under EU law, an EU migrant who cannot support themselves financially.
That, for example, was at issue in the case of Jozef Puska, the man convicted of the murder of Ashling Murphy. It was the point specifically raised in the now famous victim impact statement of her boyfriend, Ryan Casey, who said:
“It just sickens me to the core that someone can come to this country, be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over ten years, never hold down a legitimate job and never once contribute to society in any way shape or form, and commit such a horrendous, evil act of incomprehensible violence”
The fact of the matter is that after Puska had lived here for five years, he had gained an automatic right of permanent residence. But for those first five years, the state would have breached no European law by removing him and deporting him back to Slovakia on the grounds that he had “never held down a legitimate job”. It chose not to do so. Indeed, the Irish state continues not to impose any requirement to work of any kind on EU migrants who come here, or to make their continued presence here conditional on self-sufficiency.
It is important to note here that the Irish state is not doing anything illegal by not taking the view of the Germans. There is nothing at all in EU law that prevents Ireland, in essence, from offering unconditional residency rights to EU citizens. That is not the EU’s doing, but the choice of Irish politicians to go further than EU law requires them. Nor – Ryan Casey’s statement aside – has this ever been a source of mainstream political controversy. Even now, in 2025, neither Government nor official opposition expresses any interest in tightening up the laws around EU residency in Ireland.
Germany, clearly, takes a different view. Readers should note that the German view is just as compliant with EU law as the Irish view. The only thing stopping Ireland from deporting EU citizens who come here and cannot support themselves, or who come here and break the law, is the decision of the Irish state not to do so.