Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I take our Constitution, and the process of amending it, seriously. The All-Party Committee on the Constitution reported on the referendum process and set out clear and agreed procedures for the holding of referenda on constitutional amendments — agreed procedures that cannot possibly be complied with in order to meet this artificial and suddenly imposed 11 June deadline.

There has not been a Green Paper on citizenship, nor consultation with the Opposition parties, the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution or the human rights commissions, North or South. There have not been, and there are no plans for, public hearings on the factual issues said to give rise to the need for this referendum campaign. Nonetheless, we need to hear from all the interested parties. We should hear from the national immigration bureau of the Garda Síochána, the maternity hospitals, the health and social welfare services and other statutory agencies, and also from NGOs and advocacy groups. We could then arrive at an informed view.

While this is what public hearings should be about, they will not happen. There will simply not be enough time for a fully-informed debate on the proposal with only eight weeks until election day, time which was intended to be devoted to local and European issues.

The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform first sought to justify the referendum on the basis that the masters of the maternity hospitals had pleaded with him for it because so many non-national mothers were presenting late in labour. However, the masters went on the public record and contradicted this. On Tuesday last, however, we were able to read selected minutes, documents, correspondence and records apparently suggesting that the Minister was right all along. The Minister's selective leaks suggest nothing of the kind. He misrepresented the context and content and who initiated the meeting, and he was wrong about the date. I am sorry if I used the word "lie" in this regard. I only did so concerning the Minister's misrepresentation of the date. I withdraw the word "lie" and say that it was untrue. The Minister knows the date was in October 2002 not 2003, and he well knows the significance of that.

The Minister has been asked repeatedly to provide figures to show the numbers of non-national women arriving at hospitals late in labour and giving birth in Ireland purely for the purpose of securing citizenship rights for their children. He was unable to do so, although he was clearly in possession of figures, as we now know from his reply to my colleague, Deputy Jim O'Keeffe, in today's newspapers. They did not help his case and that is why he did not offer them in debate. Oddly, he was able to state in great detail the exact number of babies born to Nigerian parents and last summer on the radio he was able to tell us that "you only have to have eyes in your head to see the scale of the problem". However, the only thing our eyes can identify for us is colour. It would be terribly unjust to accuse the Minister of facilitating those who play the race card.

The Minister has not explained what abuse of citizenship law is taking place. What is its nature and scale? Even if women are being flown in just to give birth, although we still do not have details about that, we must remember that giving birth to a child here confers no rights on the mother or father. The non-national parents of Irish born children do not have the right to live here on the basis of their child's citizenship. Despite his denials this morning, the Minister did a U-turn on the motivation for the referendum. He switched from the pressure on the maternity hospitals to the need to protect the integrity of Irish and EU citizenship law and then back to the grossly misleading mantra of the number of non-national births in our maternity hospitals.

As regards the integrity of EU citizenship law, we know from a reply by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Cowen, to a question in the Dáil that no such concern has been raised at any formal level with the Government by any other member state of the EU. In any event, there is little enough integrity to a citizenship and immigration law that lacks any clear statutory underpinning or framework. The Minister has promised comprehensive legislation on immigration since he came into office. However, we are still waiting. Instead of producing an immigration code, he and his predecessor have concentrated on new and easier ways of deporting people. Even the new legislation on work permits, which was promised for more than a year, has still not appeared. The Minister told us he has had this proposal in mind and has been working on it since 2002.

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