Michael Obafemi

Let's see how he gets on with a full pre-season under his belt with his new team mates before we start worrying. He "seems" to have maintained fitness for quite some time now which is huge positive for a lad who had serious issues with various muscle injuries over the years. 

Looks like he went full John Terry lifting the Championship trophy last night after not being named in the match day squad

Hes certainly a character.

Jesus, yeah what a horrendous person to have the audacity to be born in Ireland, could he not have waited until he was back where his family came from?? 

Say what now?! Says it all I think that you drew that response from my comment, or thought that I was being in any way critical of Michael or his family.

J89 wrote:   Why what was the real reason she was in Ireland? Cause at the time his family were living in England and his older brother was born in England too.

At the time it was extremely common for Nigerians living unlawfully in the UK to travel to Ireland when heavily pregnant to have a child born in Dublin, as a form of passport tourism. This is because Irish law at the time said that if you were born in Ireland you were entitled to Irish citizenship, even if you had no historical link to the country. A similar law did not apply in the UK. 

So, a pregnant mother would often travel to Ireland at 8+ months pregnant to have the baby, then leave shortly after the child was born. The Irish citizenship then gained by the child as a result would be sufficient to prevent the family being deported from Britain, as the child would have full UK residency rights under the common travel agreement. The law was changed a few years later to make it the same as the UK, not least because maternity hospitals were suffering from bed shortages caused by passport tourism.

Just to be entirely clear, this is not in any way a dig at Michael or his family, if that is indeed how he came to be born in Ireland they did nothing illegal and nothing that thousands of others didn't do around the same time. But it seemed clear enough in the early part of the interview that he was skirting around the questions about his early childhood and I was surprised at Murphy asking if he remembered anything about Ireland given he may well have known that he likely only lived in the country for a few weeks at most. It's understandable why he may not have wanted to go into it in too much detail but at the same time I don't think it's anything that should be held against him at all.

What are you actually on about? You genuinely, genuinely need help.

Obviously he didnt decide where he was born but it's quite evident why he was born here.

He was clearly born here in a case of passport tourism, because we granted automatic citizenship to anybody born here up until it was changed by democratic referendum in 2004. People were coming here just to have babies so their babies could get automatic Irish citizenship, which by proxy led to their parents being able to stay.

https://www.rte.ie/news/2004/0422/49352-citizenship/

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-10110647.html

So the interviewer deciding to focus on his birth is a little awkward given he was only born here because of the abuse of a loophole which was highly contentious and very frowned upon at the time and resulted in one of the most one sided referendums in Irish history, to close said loophole.

His birth was "abuse" of a loophole, was it? F*cking hell, the barely veiled racism often trotted out on here is absolutely shameful.