I’m being taken away from my husband and children – all be cause of a mistake
‘She can prove every point that she has made’
WE’VE nothing to hide, we’ve been honest all the way,’ Richard Crowley says, his accent going on a linguistic tour of Ireland’s border counties, London and the US. ‘I’ve never broken the law; my only crime is marrying a Yank.’ In the sparsely decorated living room of a Belfast council house, Richard sits with his wife Megan and their children. A large Father’s Day card sits on the window sill, a cardboard cut-out Pope smiles broadly from the TV stand.
The Crowleys are in good spirits when we meet, but the banter masks anxiety. We meet ahead of Megan and her daughters — Anna, 11, and ten-year-old Mary — flying to Boston to visit Megan’s sick father.
In August, when the girls return to Belfast to begin a new school year, Megan is unlikely to return with them. As things stand, she won’t be allowed to.
Fifteen months after she first applied for Irish citizenship — a process which usually takes around six months — the 37-year-old American is still waiting to become an Irish citizen. She has become stuck in immigration limbo.
Megan blames delays by the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS) and what she calls their wilful ineptitude.
She may be forced to remain with her parents in Boston until the matter is resolved, splitting her family up in the process.
In order to get her passport back to travel to America, she had to withdraw her latest application for temporary UK residence, which usually secures her legal presence in Northern Ireland. With Irish citizenship not in place and no legal status in the UK, she will not legally be able to re-enter Northern Ireland with her daughters.
In addition, if she stays out of the Republic of Ireland for more than six weeks, she will have to start the whole citizen application process again.
Not seeing her sick father isn’t an option. ‘I need to see him,’ she says. ‘He had a massive heart attack last year; his heart stopped beating six times. He has had a pacemaker fitted but he’s still not well. I love my father. I was very upset that I couldn’t visit him last year.’
Megan, who returned to third level education last year to study maths at Queens University in Belfast, is a meticulous woman according to 42-year-old Richard. ‘You wouldn’t believe how square she is,’ he says. ‘She dots the Is and crosses the Ts, she’s one of those people who has to do everything the right way. She only deals in facts and can prove every point that she has made about her citizenship application.’
And yet, the former maths teacher has fallen foul of the Irish immigration system in a way that has worn her and her family down.
Just 15 months ago, Megan began the process of becoming an Irish citizen — which she believed would give her family security and peace of mind. Richard, a painter and decorator who hails from Enniskillen, is an Irish citizen and holds only an Irish passport.
The family has lived in Northern Ireland for 12 years, with Megan reapplying every three years for temporary UK residence or ‘leave to remain’. Irish citizenship, she says, was always the long-term goal.
Money was also a citizenship issue. The couple say they don’t meet the income requirement for permanent UK residence and even if they did, the £2,400 (€2,700) application fee is prohibitive. The €950 application fee for Irish citizenship is a more manageable figure.
In December 2017, Megan was informed by letter that her Irish citizenship application would be approved. She says she was informed that her next correspondence from INIS would be an invite to a ceremony to confer citizenship.
The invitation never came and so began another chapter in her citizenship saga.
‘My case should be a very straightforward one,’ she says. ‘I’m married to an Irish citizen. I’ve given proof of continued residence in NI which well exceeds the level of proof that’s required. I have friends from China and Bangladesh whose cases were less straightforward, but were sorted in four months. But my case has become something it didn’t need to become. It’s horrible.’
Megan and Richard met in a beachside nightclub in Boston in 2004. He had gone to America to work following a relationship break-up and ended up overstaying his US visa by four years, along with tens of thousands of other illegal Irish workers.
The couple left America to be close to Richard’s two children from a previous relationship — Caitlin, 19, and 18-year-old Brandon.
They settled in Belfast so that they would remain in the same jurisdiction as the children.
Richard didn’t apply for a Green Card following his marriage to Megan and as the result of a visa ban, when she and the children leave for Boston, he can’t travel with them.
The Crowleys seem to be stuck between an immigration rock and a naturalisation hard place.
For Megan, the problem began in early 2017. She applied to INIS that March but says there was a delay of nine weeks in hearing from the organisation. She believes her paperwork was lost by INIS, a claim which has been denied.
INIS has said that Megan’s application form was incomplete when submitted. Megan says she has documents to show that the form was returned to her asking her to tick a box which wasn’t relevant to her.
‘The box I was asked to tick related to a dead spouse, it had no relevance to my case, so I sent the form back with the box un-ticked,’ she says.
Applications for Irish citizenship can take six months, but by December 2017, Megan — concerned that her application had not been processed and that she would face legal difficulty to remain in Northern Ireland — began speaking to the media.
Her previous UK temporary residence expired on December 23, 2017 and within the allowed 14-day time limit, she put in a new application. ‘Once you have an application in you are considered legal,’ she says.
‘I have always been legal, but the problem is that applications for temporary UK residence can take up to 18 months. It can take that length of time to receive a new UK residence card.’
Following initial media reports about her situation, she says she received a phone call from a secretary to Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan in December 2017.
‘They said they would give me a
positive outcome for a good news story and that everything would be alright,’ she says.
Since she had just re-applied for temporary UK residence, she informed INIS that it would be some time before she’d have a new card.
‘They said that was no problem,’ she says. ‘But nine days before the citizenship ceremony that I thought I would be invited to, I received a request from INIS for my UK residence card. It was unprecedented. I’ve never heard of anyone receiving such a request after approval.’
Without a card to provide, her application stalled and the Crowleys now face huge difficulties.
Megan’s maths degree has also been put on hold as she deals with her citizenship crisis.
In a statement, the Department of Justice says 8,199 people became Irish citizens in 2017. ‘In all cases an applicant for citizenship must have up to date residence permission — that applies whether the applicant is living in this jurisdiction or the UK.
‘In this case we have been and are still awaiting confirmation from the applicant that she is legally resident in Northern Ireland.’
Megan Crowley sees things differently. She has accused INIS of putting out misinformation about her case. She and Richard have written to Simon Coveney, Leo Varadkar and many other politicians. Their local parish priest wrote to Micheál Martin on their behalf. Martin subsequently put forward a parliamentary question on the matter.
Such is their desperation that Megan and Richard have even written to the Pope to ask for his help.
‘INIS sent a letter to a number of TDs stating that I had submitted an incomplete application, but that is not the case. They said they had been in regular contact with me, but that’s also not true. They claimed they asked for my UK residence card in the approval letter, but I can show that there’s no mention of it in the approval letter.
‘They also said they had gone to the UK Home Office and couldn’t find a record of my application for temporary UK residence, which doesn’t make any sense as I have been legal all along. This situation wouldn’t have arisen if it wasn’t for delays and errors by INIS,’ she says. ‘They’ve tried to say the issue is between me and the UK Home Office, but there is no issue there. The errors are being made by INIS.’
‘People tell us the whole thing is bizarre,’ says Richard. ‘And we still don’t get it ourselves. Some people question us. They say we must have done something wrong to end up in this situation, but when Megan explains it, they can’t believe it.
‘You have to laugh, but there have been a lot of tears in our house, lots of sleepless nights. You sit up until 2am dealing with it, then you have to get up early in the morning to go to work. We’re exhausted and to be honest, we’ve lost hope. At this stage we need divine intervention.’
Megan began suffering from nocturnal seizures four years ago, and although she’s on medication she says they have worsened in the past year due to stress.
The real impact on the family is yet to show.
‘The thought that Megan will have to stay in America while this is resolved is scary,’ says Brandon, who just finished his A Levels and hopes to study at Queen’s University or Jordanstown.
‘But it’s hard to put into words what the impact on the family will be until it actually happens.’
Over the past month Richard reckons he has tweeted Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan twice a day. Ten days ago, he says, the minister blocked him on Twitter.
‘I wasn’t abusive. I was literally begging for help,’ says Richard. ‘We had written to Simon Coveney and Leo Varadkar.
‘Leo Varadkar is a modern day man. Simon Coveney is a father of three daughters — you’d think there would be some humanity — but we heard nothing.
‘Although Charlie Flanagan wouldn’t engage with us on social media, he did send a direct message to a random stranger in which he said he and his department were being very unfairly treated in this matter. That’s a comment I would expect from a child.’
‘We can’t understand why he won’t use his discretion to resolve my case,’ Megan says.
‘We know that when Frances Fitzgerald was Minister, she did so in a number of cases.
‘In recent days, he has agreed to look at the case of Nonso Muojeke, a Tullamore teenager threatened with deportation following the rejection of his family’s asylum appeal. Our heart goes out to that boy and his family but if Charlie Flanagan can look at a case in his own constituency on humanitarian grounds, why can’t he look at ours?’
Now the Crowleys are looking beyond the UK and Ireland to try and bring the matter to a close.
‘We have been told by solicitors that legally there is no requirement to have a UK residence card to stay in Northern Ireland, which would mean there’s no requirement for INIS to ask me for one,’ Megan says. ‘We’ve also been told that the right of a spouse of an EU citizen to live in the UK supersedes UK law, so our next step is to find a lawyer who will fight those issues for us.
‘It’s possible that we could stay in the Republic of Ireland while the matter is resolved, but doing that would mean uprooting the children and possibly losing our home which we can’t allow to happen.
‘We’re not telling the girls too much about what’s happening,’ Megan says. ‘They know we’re dealing with immigration, we’ve been dealing with immigration all their lives, with no prior problems. We don’t want to stress them out by telling them there’s a good chance they’ll be returning home in August without me.’
‘When Megan got her approval letter for Irish citizenship in December last year, we thought we could breathe a sigh of relief,’ says Richard. ‘We thought 12 years of dealing with immigration was over, that we had a permanent solution. Instead it’s been a huge smack in the face.’
‘There have been a lot of sleepless nights’ ‘We could lose our home, we can’t allow that’