Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

The Taoiseach says that this is not new. What is new is that the Taoiseach told the House on 17 February that no referendum was planned this year. He has not explained that. Neither is it new that the Taoiseach wrote to my predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, Deputy Quinn, when he raised this point at the time of the Good Friday Agreement and told him expressly that peace on our island took precedence over the question of citizenship. If the Taoiseach is saying that the problem exists of people visiting our jurisdiction purely for the purpose of gaining a passport — it makes a change from how they used to do so — and that that is the point, perhaps he will answer the question, or get one of his Ministers to do so, of how many of them are there per annum? There is no point in the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy McDowell, eliding one into the other and saying that there are so many non-national births in this jurisdiction. How many of them are "tourists", to use his term? Can we have an answer to that and to the Lenihan prescription, which was very clear?

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