biggy

JAJ what u doin up at this hour.......get tae yer bed lol

OzTennis

And there hasn't been Scottish citizenship since 1707! Not a lot of people know that either. (Welsh?) 26 out of 32 counties of Ireland only got their own citizenship in 1922, the other 6 stayed where they were! See a common denominator here? (Graffiti I saw in Ireland which will puzzle you if you look at it arithmetically - 26+ 6 = 1)

OzTennis

JAJ

There was no citizenship statute in place at the time, other than the (English) Sophia Naturalisation Act of 1705. At the time citizenship was nothing more than a common law concept of "allegiance to the monarch". And the Scottish and English monarchies had been held by the same Sovereign since 1603.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...ationality_law

At the time, a common British nationality was maintained. The Irish only introduced a local citizenship statute in 1935 and this was not recognised by the United Kingdom until 1949.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British...lic_of_Ireland

JAJ

That's correct. Prior to the late 1940s, there was a common British nationality for all Commonwealth countries. In general, a British subject had that status across the Commonwealth, although in some cases, persons naturalised in a particular Dominion were British subjects in that Dominion only. And the laws on British nationality introduced in Australia and Canada in the 1920s were very similar to the British law, but not identical.

The UK and the Dominions, plus Southern Rhodesia (technically a colony), introduced local nationality laws on the following dates:

Irish Free State : 10 April 1935
Canada: 1 January 1947
Ceylon (Sri Lanka) : 15 November 1948
United Kingdom & Colonies : 1 January 1949
New Zealand : 1 January 1949
South Africa : 2 September 1949
Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) : 1 January 1950
India : 26 January 1950
Pakistan (including Bangladesh at the time) : 13 April 1951

Newfoundland never introduced a nationality law, as it joined Canada on 1 April 1949.

kiwi_child

Correct. That Aboriginals should be able to qualify for citizenship (in the land of their birth!) and the right to vote was decided in 1968 by a public referendum on the matter. Even then the OZ govt it would seem, was too blind or gutless to just legislate the change on their own. A couple of years later and the "White Australia" policy (immigration) was ended.