Where is Rosemary from?
It is sort of depressing really, but when we were back in Ireland people kept asking us did Rosemary have an Austria passport. Our response:
Eh, no. Why would she?
The principle that you automatically become a citizen of the country of your birth is called Jus Soli. It isn’t that widely followed. If the wikipedia list is right, only 16% of countries follow this, none of them in Europe. It certainly isn’t followed here in Austria, where the principle is Jus Sanguinis or having an ancestor who is Austrian.
I said I was depressed by this situation, as we went through a referendum on all this in 2004. I was surprised that people have so rapidly forgotten the substance of the debate at the time. Or, more likely, they didn’t even bother to inform themselves back then.
Anyway, the exact rules here in Austria, like everything else in this country, are very conservative. To get Austrian citizenship requires 10 years residence, a German language test and you have to renounce any other citizenship. For a person born in Austria they do shorten the residence period, I think to 2 years.
Not that it matters. As a child of Irish parents Rosemary is entitled to an Irish passport. That process was pretty much the same as applying for an infant one in Ireland. There were two complications. First the strike in Dublin which meant it took 2 months to get the passport. Though the excellent staff in the embassy said if we had been stuck they would have provided a temporary one.
The other problem was the requirement to get an upstanding member of the community to sign her forms. Someone respectable like a priest, or a bank manager – no seriously. There are other categories of people like headmaster, and policeman, but we don’t know any of the former, and the latter don’t want anything to do with Irish passport forms (the embassy warned us there). In the end the company doctor helped us out. She told me later she got a call from someone in Dublin to confirm Rosemary’s bonafides, so I at least they are being thorough.
We got the passport in the end. And now let there be no doubt, Rosemary is 100% Irish.

Of course to the end of her days she will always be a “blow in”, but somethings you can’t do anything about.
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